Trump and the Strange History of Former Presidents Running Again

President Donald Trump

We have a policy on this blog to not talk about the 2024 elections.  There's a variety of reasons for this, but two big ones stand out.  One, Americans do not pay enough attention to midterm elections, and we don't need to underline this by skipping over November-we can wait to talk about the 2024 primaries until then.  And second, two years out from an election no one knows anything.  Two years out from 2016 it looked like we were going to get our second Bush vs. Clinton election.  In 2008, we were going to get a subway series election between Rudy Giuliani & Hillary Clinton.  And in 2002, the prospects of a sequel to the contentious 2000 election seemed probable.  What is "gospel" now will be disproven.

But every exception has a rule, and I wanted to talk today about one aspect of the 2024 election that is already happening, and is generally pretty interesting.  Donald Trump, who is currently just as likely to run for president as he is to be sitting in front of a grand jury a few months from now, is heavily expected to make a third run for the White House.  There are a lot of aspects of this that are troubling, both for Democrats and for people who are fans of democracy in general given Trump's fascist politics & authoritarian tendencies (i.e. if he wins the White House again, will we have elections anymore, or at least fair ones?).  But that is a conversation we will surely have for most of 2023-24 until the primaries are over.  Today, I want to talk about the historic nature of a former president running for the White House, which we think of as rare but isn't actually that rare...it's just hard to do.

President Martin van Buren

To underline this point, keep in mind that the first former president to run for president was not, as many would expect, Grover Cleveland, but instead Martin van Buren.  Van Buren, a lawyer before he entered politics, had been involved in politics for decades before winning the presidency at the age of 54 in 1836.  A former senator, governor, Secretary of State, and Vice President, the White House felt like the end of a long road for the longtime politico.  But in 1840, he lost to William Henry Harrison in a rematch after a bad economic recession & a string of domestic policy failures.  Van Buren, after a lifetime in politics, had lost the job he'd long sought...

...and couldn't give it up.  Van Buren kept his political contacts close, and heavily sought the nomination for the Democrats in 1844.  But his lack of support for annexing Texas cost him with Southern Democrats, and after a long convention, they went with James K. Polk as their nominee even though Van Buren had initially led the balloting.  Van Buren endorsed Polk, who would go on to win the White House.  Four years later, Van Buren would again run for the White House, but this time as a third party candidate, forming the Free Soil Party in opposition to Democrat Lewis Cass (who supported slavery, which Van Buren opposed).  Van Buren would have the strongest turnout of any third party presidential candidate in history (to that point), likely costing Cass the White House, but he would win no electoral votes and the Whig Party would take back the White House with Zachary Taylor.

Van Buren's hubris was a lesson that generally most future presidents kept in mind.  In the years that followed Van Buren, only a few presidents actively ran for the White House.  Millard Fillmore, who became president after the death of President Taylor, couldn't secure his party's nomination in 1852 (they went with Winfield Scott, likely costing them the presidency to Franklin Pierce as Fillmore would've been a better candidate in the South), but ran under the third party banner of the "Know Nothings" in 1856, similar to Van Buren getting third place (though unlike Van Buren, he did win the state of Maryland), but in the process costing his old party the White House (and in this case, exacerbating the eventual Civil War).

President Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant would be next, but unlike Van Buren & Fillmore, he was running for a third term when he attempted to win back the White House.  Elected by a solid majority in 1868 and again in 1872, Grant's presidency is generally considered less successful than his time in the military, though historians have started a reappraisal of this assessment in the years since (Grant being possibly a better president given what he inherited from Johnson than he's given credit for).  Though he left office not particularly popular, he'd rebounded enough by 1880 to have a shot at the presidency, and his surrogates looked at the Republican Convention as a way to bring him back into the Oval Office.  Grant led in early ballots against James G. Blaine, but when there was a standoff between the two, James A. Garfield was put up as a compromise candidate and Grant's chances at a third term (which likely would've happened given Garfield won in a landslide) were over.  He'd be dead within five years.

The one successful attempt to win back the White House came next, but it's worth noting that while Grover Cleveland (like Van Buren) had lost his reelection, he'd won the popular vote in 1888 against Benjamin Harrison.  He won the Democratic nomination in 1892 with ease, given he was the only success story for the Democrats nationally in decades, and due to the recent death of First Lady Caroline Harrison, the final days of the election of 1892 were arguably the kindest presidential campaign in modern history.  Cleveland had never stopped being popular, and he won the popular vote for the third time (along with the electoral college).  He retired in 1896 when it was clear that he couldn't overcome the Silver Platform & their champion William Jennings Bryan.  It's worth noting that Cleveland is one of only five people to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college: Andrew Jackson, like Cleveland, won it four years later, while Samuel Tilden, Al Gore, & Hillary Clinton didn't run again.

President Theodore Roosevelt

The last big moment of a former president running for the White House was in 1912.  Former President Teddy Roosevelt had declined to run in 1908, and his hand-chosen successor William Howard Taft took the White House instead.  But Roosevelt heavily disagreed with Taft's unsuccessful presidency, and actively pursued the Republican nomination in 1912.  But Taft was able to assemble the delegates to secure the nomination, even though most agreed that Roosevelt had the better shot in a head-to-head with the Democrats, and so Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate under the "Bull Moose" banner.  An assassination attempt soon followed (giving rise to the famous quote "it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose" which would become synonymous with Roosevelt's legend), but the two former friends (Taft & Roosevelt) split the vote, and while Roosevelt got more support than Taft (the only time in American history a third party candidate has beaten out one of the two major parties), Woodrow Wilson pulled through as a result, and would become the only Democrat to serve two consecutive terms in office between Andrew Jackson & Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

After 1912, no former president made a serious, concerted effort for the White House.  Roosevelt toyed with it briefly in 1916, but quickly lost sight of it when it was clear Republicans wouldn't back him.  Herbert Hoover secretly hoped he'd be drafted as the Republican nominee in both 1936 & 1940, but didn't actively run & and in both cases the invitation to the prom never came.  Gerald Ford, similar to Hoover, definitely kept his options open to run in 1980 but ultimately chose not to run, giving the nomination to Ronald Reagan (who briefly considered putting Ford on the ticket but decided that Ford wanted too much power in such a scenario).  Jimmy Carter's wife Rosalynn supposedly wanted him to run again in 1984, but Carter (despite some interest, similar to Ford) ultimately declined the opportunity.  I can find no evidence that George HW Bush was even rumored to be considering a fourth run for the White House in 1996, and he was the last president to lose the White House until 2020.

All of this is to say that Donald Trump has a lot of historical options here.  Trump would not be the first former president to be rumored to be looking at getting back after leaving office, and were he to run, he wouldn't be the first to try to regain the White House.  But the Cleveland comparisons bely the fact that Trump & Cleveland don't have a lot in common.  Cleveland won the popular vote (twice) before he sought a third term while Trump lost it (twice).  Most presidents who leave office popular stay unpopular if they try to get back into politics, and it's possible that Trump would be more akin to a Van Buren or Grant, struggling to even get the nomination despite going into the race as the heavy favorite.  History proves it's possible for Trump to regain the White House...but it's not the likely outcome.