Talk:1888 United States presidential election

Electoral picture peculiarity
Why is the graphic depiction of electoral votes skewed? Rarely nowadays does one see democratic votes colored red and and republican votes blue. --maru (talk) Contribs 20:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)


 * This post has been copied to Wikipedia talk:Style for U.S. presidential election, yyyy. Please direct your responses there.


 * — DLJessup (talk) 21:39, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

dirty trick? not
Was the Murchison letter a "dirty trick" no. American politicians are used to getting tricky questions, and quickly learn to finesse them. Diplomats surely are warned not to intervene in politics. Did it make a difference in voting? No--as Lee Benson showed long ago, the run romanism business did not change any votes either. The voting loyalties were very strong in those days. (See The Winning of the Midwest for explanation of that) Rjensen 23:49, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I just ordered your book from amazon.com after reading your above posting so that I can see that. Could you provide a citation to where Lee Benson showed that the “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” business didn't change any votes?


 * — DLJessup (talk) 00:20, 14 April 2006 (UTC)


 * thanks! cite is Lee Benson, Research Problems in American Political Historiography, in Mirra Komarovsky, ed., Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (1957), 124-68, Rjensen 00:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Link legitimacy?
Is the "Center for Range Voting" a legit link to be used in this page? It's definitely slanted towards "range voting". 68.39.174.238 00:59, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Numbers are wrong
There were 38 states not 36 states, and the division of states was 20 to 18. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Celtic hackr (talk • contribs) 02:49, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Dakotas
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "central", but it strikes me as quite an overstatement to say statehood for the Dakotas was a "central issue of the election". Iglew (talk) 05:51, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Familiarity with this election and others immediately before and after indicate that the Dakota factor was not the central issue. Other major issues included federal relations with the reconstructed South, money policy, populist economic concerns, tariffs.Dogru144 (talk) 01:40, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Situation of the economy?
Since most other presidential incumbents losing re-election did so during a phase of depression or even crisis of the economy, it would be nice to see in the article some infomration concerning the general state of the US economy at this time. -- 77.7.152.171 (talk) 16:21, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Why no county map?
Why no county map? Masternachos (talk) 05:52, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Blocks of Five
The sentence "They always divided 50-50 (or perhaps, $5,000-$5,000) and had no visible impact on the vote." does not make sense. One problem is the $5,000-$5,000 comment. What does that mean? The prior sentence mentions selling votes for $2. Is this a multiplication joke in a Wikipedia article where somehow someone multiplied 2 * 50 = 5000? I don't get it. Also what does 50-50 refer to? Did half of them sell their votes to one party and half to the other? The sentence uses the word "divided" but doesn't say what was divided. Also the explanation of what a floater is should come before the Dudley quote about them. This section also mentions a "circular letter." A circular letter would be a letter in the shape of a circle. A circular (when used as a noun instead of an adjective) is a letter meant for circulation. There are other grammatical errors as well such as the comma between "decades" and "with" in the third sentence. I think this whole section should be rewritten. 31.168.14.82 (talk) 03:20, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
 * The article also contradicts itself by first saying under Blocks of Five that "floaters" had no visible impact on the outcome, but then goes on to say under Electoral results that Harrison won "by means of notoriously fraudulent balloting in New York and Indiana", which appears to be a reference to the same blocks of five. So did these floaters influence the outcome or not? Jah77 (talk) 11:48, 9 March 2021 (UTC)