Similarities Of 2016 And The Election Of 1800

The presidential election of 2016 and the presidential election of 1800 were two of the most divisive and partisan elections in the history of the United States, and many of the lessons learned from the election of 1800 have carried on through the years and become relevant to the election of 2016. While the election of 2016 was widely regarded as unusual, the election of 1800 was also unusual in its time for some very similar reasons, and Edward J. Larson’s book, A Magnificent Catastrophe, describes that election in dramatic detail. Similarities between the two elections included rampant partisanship, divisions within parties, negative political attacks, and the occasional scandals, though the impacts of these were not the same for both elections.

The negative attacks that were widely publicized in the election of 2016 have various similarities to those that occurred in the election of 1800. In both political landscapes, there were two distinct parties with opposing views of how the United States’ government should be run, and each tried to persuade voters by attacking the morals and political views of the opposing party and its candidates. The two opposing parties in the election of 1800 were the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. John Adams, the incumbent president and former vice-president to George Washington, was the head of the Federalist ticket, and Thomas Jefferson, the sitting vice-president and the former Secretary of State to George Washington, was the head of the Democratic-Republican ticket. Over the course of the 1800 election, the main accusations thrown were of the opposition being monarchist, elitist, “Jacobin”, and godless. The Federalists accused the Democratic-Republicans of being godless, due to Thomas Jefferson’s public deistic religious views, and of being “Jacobins”, or anarchistic terrorists as they saw them, due to the Democratic-Republicans’ sympathies towards the cause of the Jacobin political party

In general, those who identified as Republican or Democrat or had leanings to one side or the other in the 2016 election voted for that party’s presidential candidate regardless of whether or not they actually liked that candidate in particular with very few exceptions. Some viewed this kind of extreme partisanship as new and as something that made the 2016 election even more unusual than the media was already claiming it to be. However, the election of 1800 also showed an extreme amount of partisanship, indeed probably the first of its like. In that election, every state that was solidly Federalist or solidly Democratic-Republican voted accordingly, with the few swing states deciding the election, though their votes were really decided sometimes months before the election due to the nature of the electoral system at the time; the congressional elections of the “swing states” during the election year were what really decided the states’ electoral votes since the methods of choosing electors for the electoral college from each state was controlled by each state’s congress. Similarly in the 2016 election, all of the solidly Republican states and all of the solidly Democratic states voted accordingly with only a few swing states deciding the election. The idea that partisanship can rule an election and make or break a candidate is certainly one that prevailed in the election of 1800 and