The United States has held 56 presidential elections, going back to the first in 1789. And every time, we’re told that the latest one is really, really important. ¶ Just listen to this year’s Republican contenders. “I believe this is the most important election in your lifetime, no matter how old you are,”Rick Santorum told a crowd in Tulsa this past week. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich goes further, deeming this race the most crucial “since 1860.” ¶ Democrats do it, too. “This is certainly the most important election in my lifetime — not just because I’m running,” candidate Barack Obama said in 2008. And in his 2004 Democratic convention speech, John Kerry cited war and a shrinking middle class to declare that year’s contest “the most important election of our lifetime.”¶ All elections are important, no doubt, but some must be more important than others. How can we decide which are truly historic? I don’t believe there is a single, decisive yardstick, so let me suggest an array of criteria for picking the most important elections in American history — and which contest rates as the most important of all.
Was it considered especially
important at the time?
This is the stuff of immediate context. Were voters energized? Did they expect a close vote? Were the stakes deemed especially high? And immediately afterward, did the national verdict seem particularly significant?
On this score, the 2012 contest seems to be ranking fairly high, though it may seem so precisely because we’re in the middle of it. In fact, in long-term historical comparisons, this immediacy measure is tough to get a handle on. Citizens are always supposed to be interested in elections — that is democracy, after all — and hype about the stakes is, as we know, incessant.
From the available historical accounts, it might be hard to beat 1860, when a nation facing the prospect of secession and civil war put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. There’s also the close, high-turnout election of 1896, when a frenzied rally by the business community warded off the populist William Jennings Bryan. The Rutherford Hayes-Samuel Tilden election of 1876 brought a photo finish and a contested verdict. The explosive four-candidate election of 1912 (with Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican William Howard Taft, Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt and Socialist Eugene Debs) brought talk of an Armageddon-style political showdown by the exuberant Progressives. It is also hard to rule out 1932, when FDR bested Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression, even if that contest wasn’t close and turnout was modest.
After World War II, the measurement and analysis get better. Political scientists Steven Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen used public opinion surveys to examine the period from 1952 to 1988; they reported that the indicator of voters saying they “care a good deal which party wins” peaked with the Dwight Eisenhower-Adlai Stevenson election of 1952, during the seemingly endless Korean War. More recently, the 2004 election brought high interest, probably because of the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq, while the 2008 vote saw enormous excitement and anticipation surrounding the candidacies of Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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