Presidential election rematches

Right now it’s looking quite likely that the 2024 presidential election will be feature the same two major party candidates as in 2020. This is very unusual: in fact it’s happened only once in the 30 presidential elections since 1900 — in 1956, when Eisenhower faced Adlai Stevenson for the second election in a row.

I confess to having no idea how that happened. Eisenhower trounced Stevenson by 11 percentage points and 350 electoral votes in 1952, and ended up beating him in an even bigger landslide (15 percentage points and 375 electoral votes) in the rematch.

I’m aware that nothing resembling the current primary system existed in the 1950s, and that presidential candidates were chosen pretty much exclusively by party elites, broadly defined, with essentially zero democratic input from the electorate as a whole. This seems to me to make it all the more mysterious that Stevenson got the nod to go out and get crushed by Ike four years after losing by such a huge margin in 1952.

Really the only thing I know about the 1952 election is that as late as March of that year, Truman was still considering running again, and indeed convened a meeting of his inner circle at the White House that month to moot the question. Fred Vinson, who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court (check it out: Vinson died 70 years ago this September, and was the last SCOTUS chief justice appointed by a Democrat!), was at that meeting — which seems more than a little sketchy — and wrote in a private letter afterwards that he along with the rest of Truman’s advisors were unanimously against it. Polling was in its infancy then, but Truman’s approval rating was at a low that even Richard Nixon in the depths of the Watergate scandal never quite hit, so his decision not to run again was not really surprising.

What is surprising is that Stevenson somehow got picked again in 1956. The Eisenhower presidency is basically a big blank space in my historical knowledge, so I’m curious about how that happened. By contrast, how Trump is going to end up with the 2024 nomination is of course the opposite of mysterious or puzzling; but in the days when the party well and truly decided such things, it seems very odd that the Democratic party chose to do this.