Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Gore and Carter were not alone in fearing what the label of “sore loser” might do to their reputation. Ohio governor James M. Cox said of his 1920 defeat to Warren Harding, “A wrong reaction then could have ruined my life.” James G. Blaine demonstrated the danger of complaining about a perceived injustice when he attributed his 1884 loss to disenfranchisement of African-American voters in the South. He had fallen to Grover Cleveland by barely fifty thousand votes. The New York Times accused Blaine of sour grapes because he was “smarting from defeat.”

  Richard Nixon weighed both the danger to the nation and to his own political future in deciding against challenging the results of his narrow loss to John Kennedy in 1960—even when there were credible allegations of Democrats stealing votes in Illinois and Texas (though Democrats also alleged Republican vote stealing in Ohio). Nixon discovered that few states even had a mechanism to challenge election results, and worried about the damage to the nation that a months-long process might cause, especially its “devastating” impact on national foreign policy. On a personal level, he also knew that “charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.”

  Two years later, Nixon forgot his own advice when he lost the governorship of California and famously announced he was through with politics, telling newsmen, “Just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” It was the testiest concession since the frontiersman Davy Crockett, defeated in his 1834 bid for re-election to Congress, told his Tennessee constituents they could “go to hell; I’m going to Texas.” Crockett did, only to die at the Alamo in 1836, but Nixon came back to win the presidency in 1968.

  The man Nixon beat that year, Hubert Humphrey, lost a race nearly as close as the 1960 Nixon loss to Kennedy, and he also considered the personal stake in making a graceful concession. “I told myself,” Humphrey said, “‘This has to be done right because it is the opening speech of your next campaign!’ I was already looking ahead.”

  There was historical precedent for Humphrey’s hope that losing graciously would place him in good stead for a future election. After the 1824 election of John Quincy Adams, which had been decided in the U.S. House of Representatives, Andrew Jackson was privately seething at the supposed “corrupt bargain” whereby Adams named Henry Clay secretary of state in return for Clay’s support in the House. Yet, when Jackson bumped into Adams at a social event on the very day the U.S. House decided for Adams, Jackson was expansive and gracious while Adams, the nation’s most experienced diplomat, seemed rigid and ill at ease. Jackson’s grace during the encounter was the talk of the capital, with one friend writing him: “You have, by your dignity and forbearance under all these outrages, won the people to your love.” His demeanor in defeat enhanced his reputation and helped Jackson claim the presidency when he ran again in 1828.

  Disappointed supporters of losing candidates, too, seem to immediately begin looking ahead to the next election and hoped-for retribution —with ballots, not bullets. The authors of the aforementioned Losers’ Consent found that voters who supported the losing candidate in an election certainly do have a higher distrust of our electoral system than those who supported the winner. But that level of distrust is lessened if the person is an active partisan member of one of our two major parties. Given that the two major parties in America routinely win some and lose some, those who strongly identify with one of the major parties know that while their candidate may have lost this time, their time will come again. Our oft-maligned two-party system may limit voter choices, in the opinion of some, but having two, large, relatively evenly matched parties is a key reason America does not suffer from election-related violence. It is not surprising, then, that the highest level of mistrust in our political system is felt by those who consider themselves independent or who are prone to supporting third parties. Based on the past history of third parties, these folks will likely never be on the winning side.

  Interestingly, studies have also found that distrust of the electoral system is higher after a landslide loss rather than after a close election. According to data from U.S. presidential elections from 1964 to 2000, the highest level of distrust among voters who supported a losing candidate came in the lopsided 1964 and 1972 elections, which were landslide defeats suffered by Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. The lowest levels of distrust occurred after the very close 1968 and 1976 elections, the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan won with less than 51 percent of the popular vote, and the 2000 election, despite all the controversy surrounding it.

  There are three possible explanations for this. First, when the ideological gap is wide, as was the case in the Goldwater and McGovern losses, those who support the losing candidates are likely discouraged and disbelieving that more of their fellow citizens did not see what was so obvious to them. Second, in the close elections cited, there may have been some ambivalence among the supporters of the losers; close elections occurred when the losing candidate was associated with a previous administration marked by controversy. In other words, even an intense partisan may grudgingly have to agree that it was time for a change, after all.

  Third, it is not a coincidence that Goldwater and McGovern themselves did little to hide their disappointment. Each did what is expected of a losing candidate, but no more. In his concession, McGovern said that while he congratulated Nixon on his victory, he and his supporters would “not rally to the support of policies we deplore.” Despite his obvious defeat, Goldwater declined to concede on election night because, well, he was Barry Goldwater and Goldwater, his friend, Lee Edwards, said, “ended his campaign as he began it—doing things his way, regardless of what others thought.” Goldwater sent Lyndon Johnson a congratulatory telegram the next morning, but it struck a defiant pose, pointedly telling LBJ that the Republican Party would remain “the party of opposition when opposition is called for.”

  If even such a relatively mild negative reaction can influence voter trust in the system, this simply reinforces the key role the actions of a losing candidate play in maintaining a functioning democracy. In a nation where private citizens own 270 million guns, we can only speculate about what type of crisis might erupt if a candidate ever refused to concede, or conceded in a way that created deep antagonism toward the incoming president.

  If defeated candidates want to avoid looking like sore losers, winning candidates also do not want to appear presumptuous (or worse) by declaring victory too soon. Winning candidates have waited hours—even days—for the loser to concede before declaring victory. Only when the losing candidate clearly intends to delay the concession for an extraordinarily long time, either because he believes he still has a chance to win the election, as Charles Evans Hughes did in 1916, or because of an ornery streak, as Goldwater exhibited in 1964, will the winner issue a victory statement before hearing the loser concede.

  Advances in communications technology have shaped the evolution of the concession. Through most of the nineteenth century, losing candidates either said nothing publicly or issued statements reprinted in partisan and general circulation newspapers. The lack of instant communication meant there was no shared peak moment of emotion that might trigger a violent reaction to an election result. But as communications improved, the possibility for a mass reaction increased. The telegraph was invented in 1844 and changes in printing technology and newsprint led to an explosion in the number of newspapers—from three hundred nationwide in 1814 to more than twenty-five hundred by 1850. This boom in timely communications certainly helped stir passions and form opinions in the lead-up to the Civil War. Fortunately, these instant communications could also help contain passions by allowing losing candidates to calm their supporters.

  William Jennings Bryan takes credit for issuing the first congratulatory telegram, to William McKinley in 1896. Bryan said he did so to underscore that he had no personal animosity toward McKinley, that their c
ontest had been over different political ideas, not personalities, and that “a courteous observance of the proprieties of such an occasion tends to eliminate the individual and enables opponents to contend sharply over the matters of principle, without disturbance of social relations.”

  With one exception (Thomas Dewey in 1944), losing candidates continued to send telegrams to the winners through the 1980 campaign. After that, a congratulatory phone call was deemed sufficient. Al Smith gave the first concession speech over the radio in 1928; Adlai Stevenson’s concession was the first made on television in 1952.

  Dewey’s failure to send a congratulatory note in 1944 irritated Franklin Roosevelt a great deal. Dewey did make a statement on the radio in the wee hours of the morning after Election Day to state that he would “wholeheartedly accept the will of the people.” Roosevelt, still angry at the snub, sent a terse telegram to Dewey stating, “I thank you for your statement, which I have heard over the air a few minutes ago.” Heading off to bed, Roosevelt said of Dewey, “I still think he’s a son of a bitch.”

  While Dewey was the only candidate since 1896 to decline to contact his victorious opponent, others besides Goldwater have procrastinated. Hughes, who had resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court to run for president, needed time to absorb a stunning turn of events. Early returns from the East put Hughes so far ahead that, thirty-two years before the Chicago Tribune infamously printed the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” the New York Times declared Hughes the winner over Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson ran stronger than expected in the West and when he carried California by a very narrow margin, he had won re-election. Hughes waited two weeks before sending a congratulatory telegram to Wilson, who joked that Hughes’s note was “a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”

  Even though the winning candidates and the public wait to hear it, the concession speech is commonly dismissed by commentators as a series of meaningless bromides. If concession speeches, for all their importance, seem formulaic, it is because they have assumed the character of a liturgy—even to the point of now ending with an obligatory blessing.

  Each concession speech now contains three basic sections: the validation of the result by conceding the outcome, the explanation of what the losing campaign had been about, and a final benediction with the now ubiquitous “God bless America!”

  In the first section, we hear kind words for the victor that help unite the country. The key moment is usually a simple statement, accepting the outcome as fact. McCain began his concession speech by saying, “The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.” Similarly direct prose was found in Wendell Willkie’s concession to Roosevelt in 1940: “People of America, I accept the results of the election with complete good will.” Adlai Stevenson seemed to virtually copy Willkie when he conceded to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 with the words, “The people have rendered their verdict and I gladly accept it.” Bryan in his first concession telegram to McKinley said, “We have submitted the issue to the American people and their will is law.”

  The words are carefully chosen, and any alteration in such a set piece offers a small window into how a candidate really feels. Following the controversial 2000 election, for example, Gore congratulated George W. Bush on “becoming” the forty-third president of the United States, rather than on being “elected” president.

  By cheerily (or at least with a minimum of complaint) accepting the result, the losing candidate has essentially vouched that the process was fair, or fair enough that the result cannot—or at least should not—be disputed. By conceding, the loser has effectively announced that he will not challenge the result. He also precludes those who might want to challenge the results on his behalf. If the person with the most standing to make the challenge, the losing candidate, declines to formally question the result, then no one else has a prayer of forcing an examination. The concession, then, more effectively concludes the election than any state canvassing board.

  Often, the losing candidate goes out of his way to describe the victor as “my president” or “our president,” with a pledge to support the new president or to at least “work with him.” Often added is a testament to the electoral system that has, after all, served these men well in previous electoral efforts. In conceding to Bill Clinton, President George H. W. Bush spoke of respecting “the majesty of the democratic system.” Walter Mondale, too, spoke of a system that had both “dignity and majesty.”

  It may speak to our growing worry that our nation is being pulled apart by its diversity that the word “unity” or a variation thereof now is also always included in a concession speech. Willkie was the first to use the term in 1940, as the nation prepared to enter the struggle against fascism, but it is now virtually obligatory, with John Kerry declaring in 2004 that the United States was in “desperate need for unity.”

  The call for unity is not pabulum. America is still a comparatively young nation. The American experiment still seems fragile, which is why our entire political system is designed to marginalize radicalism, forge consensus, and prevent sudden shifts in public policy that might threaten our unity. “That which unites us as American citizens is far greater than that which divides us as political parties,” Stevenson said in his 1952 concession speech. Perhaps campaigns and media coverage seem to focus on trivial issues or personalities because we subconsciously worry that larger issues featuring sharp ideological division, such as slavery in 1860, may stir passions that could become too strong to absorb the disappointment of defeat.

  Having only two major, relatively equal, ideologically centrist political parties also helps maintain national unity, but this may be changing. Where forty years ago, both parties had liberal and conservative wings, there has been a realignment in which the Republican Party is now essentially conservative and the Democratic Party essentially liberal. Whether this increased ideological divide will alter the concession ritual remains to be seen, but polling shows many Americans base whom they vote for as president on who they believe can bring America together.

  After validating the result, the second element of the concession speech is the loser’s explanation of what his campaign was all about. As Paul Corcoran, a scholar who has studied concession speeches, put it, “The rhetorical challenge is to pronounce one’s own defeat as a chapter of honor in the nation’s history, to put a brave face on failure, transforming defeat into a semblance of victory.”

  Sometimes, a losing candidate has been so closely identified with a single issue that he declares that while his campaign did not win, the campaign advanced the cause. In 1972, McGovern, whose campaign was based on promising a speedy end to the Vietnam War, told his supporters that the campaign had “pushed this country in the direction of peace,” adding, “If we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort in this campaign was worth the entire effort.”

  When there is no overriding issue on which a campaign was based, the losing candidates have often offered a laundry list of causes for which they promise to keep fighting. This particular rhetorical device has been especially prevalent in more recent campaigns where modern telecommunications demands instant analysis under circumstances not conducive to introspection. Prior to the age of television and radio, candidates had at least a few days to assess the meaning of their candidacy.

  In a slower age, having issued the customary congratulatory telegram, candidates would develop a major post-election address, often around the theme that voters would soon realize the error of their choice and make amends at the next election. In a post-election speech in 1904, Alton Parker said of the Republican victory, “Before long the people will realize that the tariff-fed trusts and illegal combinations are absorbing the wealth of the Nation. . . . When that time comes, and come it will, the people will return to the Democratic Party for relief.” Al Smith offered a similar sentiment in 1928, while referring to the Democr
atic Party as “the democracy.” If “the cause of Democracy was right before the election, it is still right, and it is our duty to carry on and vindicate the principles for which we fought.” And William Jennings Bryan philosophically noted that the burden of proof after an election is then on the ruling administration. Of McKinley’s victory, he said, “If his policies bring real prosperity to the American people, those who opposed him will share in that prosperity. If, on the other hand, his policies prove an injury to the people generally, those of his supporters who do not belong to the office-holding class, or to the privileged classes, will suffer in common with those who opposed him.”

  Concern about a campaign’s legacy is probably why modern losing candidates focus on how their campaigns involved the young. Until the ascendance of the “youth culture” concept in the second half of the twentieth century, losing candidates rarely mentioned their youthful supporters in their concession remarks. Then, in 1972, McGovern, not coincidentally a college professor, said, “If we have brought into the political process those who never before have experienced either the joy or its sorrow, then that, too, is an enduring blessing.”

  Before McGovern, except for a brief mention by Smith in 1928 (during another decade that catered to the young), no losing candidate singled out his youthful supporters for recognition. Since then, concession speeches have had a trace of the high school commencement address. In 1984, Walter Mondale offered a “special word to my young supporters this evening . . . in every defeat is to be found the seeds of victory,” while Michael Dukakis, who became a college professor after his defeat, advised his young supporters in 1988 to consider a career in the “noble profession” of public service because “there is nothing you can do in this world more fulfilling and more satisfying than giving yourself to others and making a contribution to your community and your state and your nation and your fellow citizens.”