« The Iran Factor | Main | HITS Event Tonight » Lincoln-Douglass01 May 2008 02:41 pm
Apparently there was some confusion in Fox News' coverage of Hillary Clinton's proposal that she and Barack Obama compete in some Lincoln-Douglas debates. I think there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency without any change in the underlying shape of public opinion. Comments (42)
HAHAHAHAHA... funniest thing i've seen in a very long time. I think they should do a Lincoln-Douglass debate, and Hillary wear a stove-pipe hat and beard. 
I wouldn't have expected Faux News Producers to be quite this stupid, but they are.
popular vote with a runoff also probably would have gotten us a second GHW Bush term and then probably Bob Dole. Not to mention probably another Teddy Roosevelt term in 1912, leading up to WWI. Now there's a counterfactual that should be written.
Idiocracy.
FS-Fucking-M. I'm almost surprised they didn't throw up a pic of Buster Douglas...
popular vote with a runoff also probably would have gotten us a second GHW Bush term Not true. http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh062905.shtml
there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency without any change in the underlying shape of public opinion ...Except that if the U.S. used a different election system, things would have changed long before (1824 at the very latest), and thus we would never have gotten to 1860 in the version we know. I don't think there's a possible system that would have produced identical outcomes up to 1860, but then given a different result there. Which is to say, this counterfactual is unexplored because it's not really possible. (Even aside from the issue of whether such a system was really remotely plausible as an outcome of the Constitutional Convention in the first place.) SF
I think they should do a Lincoln-Douglass debate, and Hillary wear a stove-pipe hat and beard. I thought the Fox News line was that Bill was her beard.
there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency without any change in the underlying shape of public opinion ...Except that if the U.S. used a different election system, things would have changed long before (1824 at the very latest), and thus we would never have gotten to 1860 in the version we know. I don't think there's a possible system that would have produced identical outcomes up to 1860, but then given a different result there. Which is to say, this counterfactual is unexplored because it's not really possible. (Even aside from the issue of whether such a system was really remotely plausible as an outcome of the Constitutional Convention in the first place.) SF
Oops, sorry, thought it hadn't posted the first time.
"underexplored historical counterfactual" yeeesh. what a mouthful.
MY: Fox News is in a constant state of confusion. This was just a more blatant example of it.
there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency Not to mention, of course, that not only were those debates not Presidential (they were candidates for U.S. Senate), and not only was it not even a Presidential election year (1858), but Douglas won, becoming one of Illinois's senators. Anyway, senators were appointed by legislatures in those days, not popular vote, so the debates weren't intended for popular demagoguery.
Hey, at least it wasn't Abe Lincoln and Michael Douglas. The Fox Nooz Googlers at least had the right time period!
Fox news can't be this stupid. This must be some kind of joke.
Wonkette (and a previous commenter here) gets it wrong too. Lincoln and Stephen Douglas weren't Senatorial candidates, since Senators weren't elected in those days. In 1858, the next Senator would be appointed by the next Illinois State Senate. They were just a couple of schlubs who hoped to become Senators if their party controlled the State House.
This is nothing more than yet another instance of the shit-all stupid motherfuckers leading the shit-all stupid motherfuckers.
old guy: Two guys vying to be the next Senator from their state. How does that not make them, y'know...candidates?
The 1860 elections was really two parellel elections, one in the northern states between Lincoln and Douglas, and one in the southern states between Breckinridge and Bell. The two northern candidates had nearly no support in the south, and vice versa, to the point of not all four candidates appearing on the ballot in most states. Given this, secession of part of the country was probably inevitable after the election. Lincoln beat Douglas by about 55% to 45% in the northern states, and carried nearly every northern state. Since two thirds of the population was in the north, this gave him an Electoral College majority despite getting almost no votes in the south and not even being on the ballot in most of the southern states. What Lincoln getting no votes in the South accomplished was in preventing him from getting a nationwide majority in the popular vote, but by that time the division in the country was advanced enough that the concept of the nationwide popular vote was pretty meaningless. A better counterfactual was 1912, since Roosevelt and Taft split the Repubican vote, by about the same margin Roosevelt prevailed over Taft in the primaries, in a national popular vote and runoff system Roosevelt probably would have won a third term. And it would have been different from Wilson's first term in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
Well, WH press secretary Dana Perino confessed a few months ago to knowing nothing about the Cuban Missile Crisis. She knew that it involved “Cuba” and “missiles”…..somehow…..at some period of time in America’s past. What was it Karl Rove said about creating your own history?
At least Frederick Douglass was there -- Stephen Douglas pointed him out in words that I won't repeat as a way to stoke the crowd against Lincoln. My great-great grandfather was there too, at least at the Knox College debated. Unfortunately, he went out to dinner afterwards with his buddy Stephen Douglas.
"I'm almost surprised they didn't throw up a pic of Buster Douglas..." Now I would love to have seen that debate! In this corner in the stove-pipe hat...
There was an early, less-formal debate in my home town. Douglas had spoken and Lincoln was going to address the same people.. Douglas partisans called this 'stealing the crowd' and tried to block Lincoln. But my great-great-great-grandfather was driving the wagon with Lincoln in the back, and cleared the way with his bullwhip.
If you had a popular vote with the run-off, things would have been very different, overall. In terms of ways to get a Douglas presidency, you might be able to manage slight changes to the Democratic convention in Charleston that results in the Democrats not being split, and Douglas being the nominee of a united Democratic Party. If you look at the voting in 1860, even adding up all the votes for Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell only gives two more states to Douglas - California and Oregon - plus four more electoral votes from New Jersey - to the ones won by the three put together in reality. Lincoln still wins 169 to 134. (The same happens if you keep Bell in, but leave the Democrats united, I think). But with a unified Democratic Party, and with the administration using its patronage people to back up Douglas in the north, which they didn't do because Buchanan was backing Breckinridge, you might see Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania going for Douglas. Illinois and Indiana alone would, I think, be sufficient to give the election to Douglas, when you add in New Jersey, the two west coast states, and all 15 slave states (that's 158 electoral votes, a bare majority). Another interesting possibility is to throw the thing to the House. Putting Seward, who was a lot less popular out west than Lincoln, might be enough to do this - again, only California, Oregon, Illinois, and Indiana need to switch for that to be possible. Lincoln won California and Oregon by only a tiny number of votes - 734 in California and 254 in Oregon. Douglas would surely win Illinois if his opponent is anyone other than Lincoln. Indiana's harder to say, but it would certainly be a lot closer in a Seward v. Douglas contest than a Lincoln v. Douglas one, and it was reasonably close as it was. Of course, if it goes to the house, I'm not sure who wins, but it's clearly not Douglas. The top three candidates in the electoral college are considered by the House. In this scenario, these would be Seward and Breckinridge, definitely. Who the other is would depend on exactly how things break down. Bell got 39 electoral votes. If you give Douglas Illinois, Indiana, and California in addition to Missouri and three votes from New Jersey, he gets 37. But he might end up with all the votes out of New Jersey in this scenario (I'm not sure why he didn't). But Bell might conceivably win Maryland in this scenario (he lost by a very narrow margin), which would put him back over the top. I'll look at the possibilities of a Seward/Breckinridge/Bell house race and a Seward/Breckinridge/Douglas one. 15 free states had Republican majority delegations in the 36th Congress. Only 3 (Illinois, California, and Oregon) had Democratic majorities. Of the 15 slave states, eleven had Democratic majorities. California (whose two congressional representatives were both southerners), Oregon (whose lone congressman was an ally of Breckinridge's pro-southern Oregonian running mate Joseph Lane) and the eleven slave states would likely all vote for Breckinridge. (Missouri, which Douglas won, might be an exception if Douglas is in the mix, but probably not) What Illinois does, I'm not sure. If Douglas is the third candidate, he'd control the majority, but he'd also know he probably couldn't win, and Douglas was generally opposed to the whole "House deciding the election" idea. I'm uncertain as to what would happen. Also - the split there is 5-4, so only one Douglasite has to defect for the state to vote for the Republican, which seems more likely than all five agreeing on Breckinridge or Bell. So Illinois is likely for Seward (or Lincoln, if we posit it going to the house with him, which I'm not sure would happen). The other four slave states are Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Of the four, Tennessee would have a majority for Bell, while the other three were evenly split between Democrats and Constitutional Union types. Seward, or any Republican, would have a very difficult time winning the house. He has fifteen states easily, and quite possibly Illinois would fall to him as well (even more likely if Lincoln is the nominee and it goes to the House). But it's very hard to see where he'd pick up the necessary 17th state. Pro-southern Democrats control the Oregon and California delegations, and no southerner is going to vote for any Republican. If it's a choice between Lincoln/Seward, Breckinridge, and Bell, though, what the Republicans might do is throw the election to Bell, who would have been infinitely preferable to Republican as a president than Breckinridge or Lane. Bell would have Tennessee locked up. If you give him all the Republican votes, that gives him 15 more. All he would need to win, then, is one defector in either Kentucky, Maryland, or North Carolina, and he'd be chosen. But Republicans might not do this. If it's Lincoln/Seward, Breckinridge, and Douglas, then I think Breckinridge is easily chosen by the House - Douglas had said he wouldn't play the game, so all the southern Bell supporters would likely end up voting for Breckinridge. Anyway, lots of weird outcomes are possible out of 1860 without much of a change in the overall voting patterns.
now that's hilarious.
there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency Not to mention, of course, that not only were those debates not Presidential (they were candidates for U.S. Senate), and not only was it not even a Presidential election year (1858), but Douglas won, becoming one of Illinois's senators. Anyway, senators were appointed by legislatures in those days, not popular vote, so the debates weren't intended for popular demagoguery.
My great-great grandfather was there too, at least at the Knox College debated. Unfortunately, he went out to dinner afterwards with his buddy Stephen Douglas. Yeah, well Mitt Romney was there too. Or at least he remembers being there...
The 1860 elections was really two parellel elections, one in the northern states between Lincoln and Douglas, and one in the southern states between Breckinridge and Bell. The two northern candidates had nearly no support in the south, and vice versa, to the point of not all four candidates appearing on the ballot in most states. Somewhat right, but not entirely correct. In the north, the numbers skew a bit because in several states there were fusion tickets where supporters of all three non-Lincoln candidates voted for a single slate of electors, who are normally counted towards Douglas's totals. (This particularly hurts Bell's northern totals, I think). With this, though, the numbers in each section are as follows: North - Lincoln 54%, Douglas 36%, Breckinridge 8%, Bell 2% More than half of Breckinridge's northern vote came from Pennsylvania, where, thanks to Buchanan's influence, he was the official Democratic candidate and got 38% of the vote. He also did well in California and Oregon, where the Democratic vote was practically evenly split between Douglas and Breckinridge, allowing Lincoln to narrowly win both states. Bell's best northern state was Massachusetts, the home state of his running mate, Edward Everett, where he did almost as well as Douglas (although both were pitifully behind Lincoln, who won by an enormous landslide). In New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, neither Bell nor Breckinridge are counted for any votes because there were fusion tickets, but Bell's total, at least, is probably considerably reduced as a result - he would have had a decent total out of New York, at least, where he had some prominent conservative ex-whig supporters. Nonetheless, Bell didn't come close to winning any northern states. South - Breckinridge 45%, Bell 40%, Douglas 13%, Lincoln 2% Douglas, at least, was a genuine national candidate, I think - he actually campaigned heavily in the south, at a time when the candidate himself campaigning was basically unheard of. He was a factor in a number of southern states - he won Missouri (in a very close race with Bell, with Breckinridge a distant third), and ran in double digits in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana. He did pretty poorly in the other southern states, though, although well enough in Tennessee and Virginia to throw those states to Bell. Bell came in first or second in every southern state. In addition to the states he won (Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee), he also competed strongly in Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, and North Carolina. Lincoln was not even on the ballot in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. The only states where he got more than a derisory share of the vote were Delaware (where he was quite strong, coming in third only a few points behind Bell), and Missouri, where he won St. Louis. At any rate, while obviously the two main candidates in each section were different, Douglas really did run a national campaign and managed to win a slave state, while Breckinridge and Bell both at least attempted to compete in the north, and even Lincoln got a few border south votes.
Wahoo five - actually, Douglas was running for reelection to the senate in 1858 - he'd been first elected in 1846. And, because the state legislature elections were being held in 1858, there was a campaign for the popular vote, in that if Republicans won the legislature, Lincoln would be elected, whereas if the Democrats maintained control, Douglas would be. Illinois was, at that point, still a very Democratic state, and Douglas was still quite popular (although his positions on slavery were less popular). The legislative elections were, essentially, a proxy for a straight up contest between Lincoln and Douglas, and this was obviously made more so by the debates. While Douglas won the battle, though, the position he'd been forced to take on slavery in the territories (that territorial legislatures could, in spite of the Dred Scott ruling, effectively ban slavery by not passing affirmative laws to protect it) made him poison in the south, and was one of the main contributing factors in bringing about the Democratic party split in 1860.
Who was Douglas' VP running mate? Because that is who would have served out almost all of Douglas' term if he had been elected instead of Lincoln. Douglas died of cancer in June of 1861.
Thanks for the clarification, John, although surely there were other issues affecting people's votes for the legislature than whom they would choose as senator. JonF, I don't think senators actually have running mates, do they?
You kids are being way too nice to Yglesias. He burns Fox News, then lights his own ass on fire insinuating that Douglas ran against Lincoln for President. That's embarrassing! You went to Harvard, Yglesias. C'mon now.
For what it's worth the story about my family's association with Douglas is true; unfortunately it appears that the documentary evidence may have gone missing after my mother died six weeks ago. On the other hand, the stories about the same great-great-grandfather and Lincoln that I heard as a kid are probably not true, although they must have been acquainted as they were in the legislature at the same time. Since Mitt Romney was mentioned, I'm curious, but will never know, what the family thought of the LDS at Nauvoo, which was not that far from where they lived.
You kids are being way too nice to Yglesias. He burns Fox News, then lights his own ass on fire insinuating that Douglas ran against Lincoln for President. That's embarrassing! Douglas did run against Lincoln for president in 1860. Thanks for the clarification, John, although surely there were other issues affecting people's votes for the legislature than whom they would choose as senator. Certainly, but this particular legislative election was pretty effectively nationalized, by the debates themselves. That said, the Democrats probably won more based on their traditional dominance of Illinois state politics than because Illinoisians preferred Douglas' view of the slavery issue to Lincoln's. Who was Douglas' VP running mate? Because that is who would have served out almost all of Douglas' term if he had been elected instead of Lincoln. Douglas died of cancer in June of 1861. Douglas's running mate was Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia. But it's hard to see a scenario where Douglas wins and Johnson becomes vice president. Johnson, the former governor of Georgia, was picked because he was just about the only southerner who was willing to be Douglas's running mate - the convention had initially picked Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama, who refused it because of administration pressure, and in fact backed Breckinridge. The only way Douglas wins is if there's a united Democratic party, and if that happens, Douglas would have a different running mate - perhaps Robert Hunter of Virginia, or Andrew Johnson. Certainly it would be a southerner, though.
Bah. I am chagrined. Apologies, Yglesias.
I guess Obama's not the first African American with a shot at the Presidency according to Fox!
JonF, I don't think senators actually have running mates, do they? ???
How did not one person at Fox wonder what the hell Lincoln and Douglass would be debating in the first place and how Douglass could even be on the ballot anywhere to run for president? Plus, isn't Douglass's name spelled with two "s"s? This is stuff a smart fourth-grader knows, yet FoxNews editors don't.
Frankly, I'm surprised that Fox didn't use a picture of the actor who *played* Frederick Douglass in the movie "Glory".
The book "What If? 2" contains an essay on a second Theodore Roosevelt presidency by John Lukacs. It takes its point of divergence the Republican convention, with TR being nominated instead of Taft. It's actually a second-order counterfactual, with the familiar pattern of history reasserting itself. Basically, Lukacs speculates that not much would have ended up being different. He envisions an earlier entry and slightly different resolution to WWI, but he still foresees the Republican party being taken over by corporate types in the '20s, the Depression still occurring, Hitler still coming to power, etc. It's not a bad effort. I do have a few quibbles with it -- I could buy that much of TR's domestic legislation may actually have wound up looking like Wilson's. But would TR have gone to war with Mexico (as Wilson nearly did at this point)? If he had succeeded in ending WWI earlier, would there still have been a Bolshevik Revolution in Russia? Without one, does Hitler come to power in Germany (since much of the Nazi triumph came from a fear of the Communists, not merely dissatisfaction with Versailles)? Lukacs also sloppily says that under Roosevelt, Arizona and New Mexico are admitted as one state in 1913. In real life, both states were admitted in 1912, so TR would never have had the possibility of changing their status.
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Heads in the Sand
The sad thing is that in the current iteration of the Republican party, the idea of Lincoln and Douglass being political opponents probably makes sense. How many Fox viewers didn't bat an eye at that graphic?
Posted by Ryno | May 1, 2008 2:46 PM