How do today’s close presidential elections compare to those of the late 1800s?

[All Along The Watchtower]

In terms of margins, polarization, and the major political and cultural issues of the era.
Are there any broad parallels?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The most glaring difference is of course the electoral map itself, the geographic bases of the parties. William Jennings Bryan overtly ran a sectionalist campaign against what are some of the most heavily and immovably Democratic parts of the country today. The most glaring similarity is the high salience of immigration and apprehensiveness about cultural minorities in both periods of American political history and, for that matter, the fact that the Republicans have been on the more restrictive and assimilationist side and the Democrats on the less restrictive and assimilationist side both times. I'll post more later but I wanted to get the low-hanging fruit out of the way first.

[pbrower2a]

We li9ve in a very different world from the late 19th century. The Civil War still had divisive repercussions between the South and everywhere else. Labor movements were much more radical than unions since the 1930s that have become part of the Establishment instead of pariahs. Formal education beyond the early-elementary level (just look at any Western movie and you will find mass illiteracy as a norm); part of the decline of the distinctiveness of the Wild West is mass education that became the norm in the West among the children of cowhands, miners, and rail workers. Even a little learning tended to make people, and thus the communities in which they live, less violent. Just look at movies depicting the end of the line for Wild West outlaws; the last movies of John Wayne indicate that his very old character faces the same vile enemies that or his character he knew in the past -- then as pathetic old men still ignorant, full of rage, and quick to anger. Even aside from the extreme subjection of the descendants of African slaves, the WASP elite ruled harshly.

Add to this, the technologies of travel and communication are very different from then. Yes, the telephone was invented in 1876 and recorded music in 1877, but these were primitive and expensive. There was no radio. Communications between a reporter out of town and the newspaper for which he relayed a story were by the telegraph, Cars came into existence late in the 10th century, but outside of the cities the roads were so bad that horse-and- buggy traf Primitive as the technology was, that less distinguished elections of the late 19th century from what we know today. fic was still more reliable