1892 United States presidential election
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444 members of the Electoral College 223 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 75.8% 4.7 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential election results map. Blue denotes states won by Cleveland/Stevenson, red denotes those won by Harrison/Reid, green denotes those won by Weaver/Field. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 8, 1892. In the fourth rematch in American history, the Democratic nominee, former president Grover Cleveland, defeated the incumbent Republican President Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland's victory made him the first president in American history to be elected to a nonconsecutive second term.
Though some Republicans opposed Harrison's renomination, he defeated James G. Blaine and William McKinley on the first presidential ballot of the 1892 Republican National Convention. Cleveland defeated challenges by David B. Hill and Horace Boies on the first presidential ballot of the 1892 Democratic National Convention, becoming the fourth presidential candidate to be nominated for president in three elections, after Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. Groups from The Grange and the Knights of Labor joined to form a new party called the Populist Party. It had a ticket led by former congressman James B. Weaver of Iowa.
The campaign centered mainly on economic issues, especially the protectionist 1890 McKinley Tariff. Cleveland ran on a platform of lowering the tariff and opposed the Republicans' 1890 voting rights proposal. He was also a proponent of the gold standard, while the Republicans and Populists both supported bimetallism.
Cleveland swept the Solid South and won several important swing states, taking a majority of the electoral vote and a plurality of the popular vote. Weaver won 8.6% of the popular vote and carried several Western states, while John Bidwell of the Prohibition Party won 2.2% of the popular vote.
Cleveland was the only president elected to a second nonconsecutive term until Donald Trump was reelected in 2024. The 1892 election was third in a streak of four presidential elections (from 1884 to 1896) that saw the incumbent party defeated. Another such streak of four occurred from 1840 to 1852; the next-longest streak was the three elections from 2016 to 2024.