Simon Cameron in 2016

[Republican Party Stalwart]

For those of you who don't know, Simon Cameron (born 1799, died 1889) was an influential Republican politician from Pennsylvania during the Nineteenth Century. A Democrat before 1849, then aligned with the "American Party" (the Know-Nothings following their "moderation"/"rebranding" as a civic-nationalist and Unionist party), he became a Republican in 1856. He served as a senator from Pennsylvania three times (from 1845 to 1849, then from 1857 to 1861, and then from 1867 to 1877). He served in the Lincoln administration as Secretary of War from 1861 to 1862 (before being replaced in that role by his lawyer, Edwin Stanton), then as minister to Russia from June to September 1862.

He was best known for being the chief architect of the Republican political machine that allowed the GOP to dominate Pennsylvanian politics until after the onset of the Great depression, and which continued to be influential until the mid-Twentieth Century. Cameron was a Radical Republican who played an important role in the Party from its formative years until his death in 1889, including during the Civil War, the Lincoln administration, and Reconstruction. Following the end of Reconstruction and the transformation of the "Radical" and "moderate"/"conservative"/"liberal" factions of the Republican Party into, respectively, the "Stalwart" and "Half-Breed"/"Mugwump" factions of the GOP, Cameron was an important Stalwart leader who defended the GOP's reliance on patronage, machine politics, and Black voting rights to win elections. During the 1880 Republican National Convention, Cameron controlled the Pennsylvania delegation and was a strong supporter of former President Ulysses S. Grant's re-nomination for a nonconsecutive third term as president. After Cameron's death, his son J. Donald Cameron succeeded him as the primary leader of the Pennsylvania Republican Party and of the political machine that he created.

As you can probably expect, Cameron's most reputed quality (both then and now) was his remarkable "corruption." When contemporary Senator Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) - who was otherwise Cameron's own supporter, comrade, compatriot, and copartisan - was once asked if there was anything that Cameron wouldn't steal, answered "I don't think that he would steal a red hot stove." Cameron later demanded Stevens's retraction; Stevens's response, delivered to President Lincoln to be passed down to Cameron, was, "I believe I told you he would not steal a red hot stove. I will now take that back."

Cameron has always been an interesting figure to me. In my view, he could perhaps best be described as an early conservative Republican, who combined the policies and political positions of the Whig Party (the party which most of his copartisans had previously belonged to) with the strategies, tactics, and proletarian pragmatism of the Democratic Party (the party which he had previously belonged to). For many reasons, I thought it would be interesting to ask who he would have voted for in 2016.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I think I would largely agree with that analysis and to my eyes and to answer your question, I would tend to think he would for Trump/Pence. This is because of the trade issue, how important it was for PA, the fact that Trump did rather well with what passes as "the successors to the GOP machines in the Northeast" and obviously is not too concerned with personal corruption.