Describe a Scott-Fremont-Lincoln-Lincoln-Seymour-Hendricks-Hayes-Garfield-Blaine-Harrison voter

[Dac10]

I legitimately wonder if there was any county that followed this trend lol?

[I Will Not Be Wrong]

A Jewish voter?

[Alben Barkley]

This is actually very simple and probably was not nearly as uncommon as you think: A Whig turned Republican who didn't like US Grant.

There were enough of those to split the GOP in two in 1872. Nobody actually voted for Hendricks; they voted for the anti-Grant "Liberal Republican" Horace Greeley, an abolitionist newspaper publisher and former Whig turned Radical Republican who thought Grant was corrupt and that the GOP had strayed from its original intentions under his leadership and was not liberal enough. If you like him were something of an idealist who had been an abolitionist Whig turned Radical Republican, it's not hard at all to see how you could vote for him over Grant yet still prefer Whigs/Republicans before and after.

The reason electors voted for Hendricks and in some cases other Democrats over Greeley is because he died between the general election and the meeting of the Electoral College. The Democrats had made an "enemy of my enemy" type alliance with Greeley and the Liberal Republicans, believing they could not win with their own candidate and liking that Greeley wanted to end Reconstruction (though not so much that he called for equality between whites and blacks --- something actually in the 1872 Democratic platform as a result of the fact that they adopted the Liberal Republican platform when they nominated Greeley).

It was certainly an ironic and uneasy alliance, given how vehemently Greeley had opposed the Democrats his entire career to this point. Nonetheless, Greeley won several Southern states as the Democratic nominee. But when he died, his electors were freed to vote for their preferred Democratic candidate (Hendricks got the most votes) now that Grant had won anyway. It was Greeley who got the actual votes on election day though, and while some of those votes came from loyal Southern Democrats, undoubtedly much of his vote in the North actually came from Radical/Liberal Republicans and others who just didn't like Grant.

Seymour is a bit more difficult to explain, as Grant wasn't yet seen as corrupt by most Republicans. However, Seymour was a Unionist during the war and had been the Governor of New York. He had some appeal to the North, winning New York, New Jersey, and Oregon -- states that Lincoln won twice and Grant would win four years later. It's not inconceivable that a former and future Whig/Republican voter would have temporarily soured on the GOP for whatever reason -- perhaps they didn't approve of the impeachment of Johnson, perhaps they didn't like how Reconstruction was being handled, perhaps they thought it was time for change and unity after the war, perhaps they personally liked Seymour more than Grant -- could have voted for Seymour. Although this pattern would admittedly make more sense in most cases if the voter had gone for Grant in 1868 but not 1872.

Another possibility is a Southern/border state Union loyalist who had opposed slavery and been a Whig/Republican before the war (they did exist, however small in numbers) but did not approve of Reconstruction or Grant. Then went on to support Republicans in the future after Reconstruction ended.

[tinman64]

Dead.

[Orser67]

I think that Whig-Republican-Democrat (in 1868 and 1872)-Republican was a pretty unusual voting pattern. It kinda sounds likes a Liberal Republican, but the defection in 1868 doesn't fit that pattern. 1876 is also really problematic here. I could see someone who generally liked the Republican Party but was strongly anti-Reconstruction defecting from the party for the three elections from 1868 to 1876, but it's hard to see someone like that deciding to return to the party in 1876. It's also pretty weird to vote Republican in 1856 but Democratic in 1868, and the 1856 vote rules out a lot of people in the border states.

This sounds like a Whig-turned-Republican who holds a very strong personal grudge against Grant. I guess it's possible that this is a former Whig who hated Reconstruction but figured it was basically over by 1876 regardless of the results of the election.

Also, this is off-topic, but I've always found it interesting that, in the aftermath of a major war and going up against a war hero, Seymour was able to keep the 1868 election fairly close in the popular vote.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

An abolitionist Democrat who bolted the party over the issue of slavery but returned to voting Democrat once the war was over because they thought that reconstruction was being pursued too heavy handily.