From blowing budgets on booze to based Founding Father name-calling: funny facts about past US elections

Part 👉 Part 2

The 2024 race has seen its share of funny and meme-worthy moments, from Biden and Trump arguing about their golf game at a debate to the former president riding around in a garbage truck in front of media after his supporters were called “garbage.” But on the whole, 2024 has been pretty tame by historical standards of funny and bizarre politics.

🔸When George Washington, the US’s first president, launched his political career for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758, when America was still under British rule, he spent his whole campaign budget of £40 – equivalent to over $11,600 today, plying voters with beer, wine, rum, cider and brandy. It helped him, and Washington held the seat until the start of the American Revolution in 1775.

If you think Harris and Trump calling each other “fascist,” “dumb as a rock” or “lazy as hell” is bad, you haven’t seen what candidates and their surrogates were saying about each other 200 years ago. In 1800, a newspaper editor ally of Thomas Jefferson called John Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

🔸Adams gave as good as he got, dubbing Alexander Hamilton a “bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.” Hamilton was later killed a duel by Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr, in 1804.

🔸In the 1828 election, surrogates for John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, accused Andrew Jackson of adultery, murder and (justifiably) war crimes against Native Americans in election pamphlets after Jackson called Adams a beacon of quid pro quo corruption.

👉 Part 2

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

From blowing budgets on booze to based Founding Father name-calling: funny facts about past US elections

Part 2👉 Part 1

🔸In 1860, Broughton’s Monthly Planet Reader and Astrological Journal featured the astrological charts for presidential candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, and sought to link their prospects for success or failure as president by studying their horoscopes.

Ulysses S. Grant, who served as president between 1869 and 1877, was the only president to ever be arrested, with a policeman in Washington, DC pulling him over and taking him into custody in 1872 for racing his horse and buggy down the streets of an aristocratic quarter of the city and ignoring repeated warnings to stop. Grant took the arrest in stride, dutifully heading down to the local police station, but failed to show up for a court appearance the next day, for which he was fined $20 (about $515 today).

🔸The 1884 election featured a bit of phrenology – the pseudoscience which suggests that a person’s skull shape is linked to cognitive ability. Candidates Grover Cleveland and James Blaine’s skulls were analyzed in a pamphlet to determine “the capacity of one [Blaine] and the incapacity of the other [Cleveland].” The smear (one of several like it in the race) failed, and Cleveland was elected president.

🔸In the 1920 election, independent socialist and trade unionist and presidential candidate Eugene Debs was forced to run his campaign from prison, as he was sentenced in 1918 for an anti-war speech in Ohio. Despite his incarceration, Debs won over 900,000 votes (3.4% of the total).

👉Part 1

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️With over 19% of the votes counted in Florida, Trump is currently leading with 51.96%, while Harris trails with 47.28%.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️Trump is leading in the swing state of Georgia with 54.38%, while Harris follows with 45.44%, with less that 1% of the votes counted.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️Trump is so far leading Harris in the electoral vote count in the US presidential election, having secured 19 votes to her 3.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️In Virginia, with less than 1% of the votes counted, Trump is currently leading with 56.38%, while Harris stands at 42.34%.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️In Vermont, with almost 2% of the votes counted, Harris is leading with 57.9%, while Trump trails at 39.3%.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️Harris is leading in New Hampshire with 51.2%, while Trump trails at 47.6% with more than 2% of the votes counted.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

📹CNN anchor on the possibility of Kamala Harris winning

In light of survey results, according to which 72% of Americans are dissatisfied or angry with the country's leadership, it would be a "miracle" if Kamala Harris wins, Chris Wallace said:

"It would be a miracle that Kamala Harris could win with that kind of headwind [...] If she is able to overcome those numbers and still win this election, then she has done a remarkable job of somehow separating herself that she's part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

In the swing state of North Carolina, Harris is leading with 68.78%, while Trump trails at 30.06%.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

THROWBACK: Putin welcomes Trump's readiness to restore US-Russian relations

"Trump is a vivacious individual," Russian President Vladimir Putin said during the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2016.

"But what I'm precisely focusing on and what I certainly welcome... is that Mr. Trump has stated that he is ready for a full-scale restoration of US-Russian relations. We all welcome it. And you don't?" Putin queried.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️In the swing state of Pennsylvania Harris is leading with 72.5%, while Trump trails at 26.7% with 2.6% of the votes counted.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️In the swing state of Michigan, Harris is leading with 76.73%, while Trump trails at 22.06%.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Economic interests key as US election unfolds with minor incidents

The US election on November 5 proceeded in a calm atmosphere, albeit with some “incidents,” Roberto Zepeda Martínez, a researcher at the Center for North American Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), tells Sputnik.

The analyst believes that the outcome of the election will be determined by the results in the battleground states. Additionally, the final results of early voting will need to be awaited. However, in his opinion, a surge in violence following the public vote is unlikely.

“I don’t think that will happen; of course, such a scenario is possible, but the US cannot afford protests of this kind that would undermine democracy [...] We’ll see, I’m not a pessimist, and it’s important to remember that economic and industrial interests carry significant weight,” he adds.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

⚡️At present, Donald Trump is leading in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, securing 101 electoral votes.

In contrast, Kamala Harris is leading in Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, and the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, with a total of 71 electoral votes.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Top five most surprising presidential upsets in US history

Part 1 👉 Part 2

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election may have shocked pollsters, his opponent, many Americans and even Trump himself, but it certainly wasn’t the first political upset of its kind:

Reagan vs. Carter

🔸 Historical retconning aside, the result of the 1980 election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan seemed anything but certain. While Carter’s presidency was mired by inflation and energy crises and the Iran hostage fiasco, Reagan’s landslide was a surprise to many contemporaries, with the incumbent expected (erroneously) to carry more of the powerful evangelical voting bloc, working class and urban voters.

* Polling up to the final weeks showed Carter and Reagan within a hair sliver of each other, with an October 17-20 Gallup poll showing Carter leading 41-40%. A week later, Reagan was in the lead 46-43%, thanks to his performance in the October 28 TV debate, whose 80 million voter viewership made it the most-watched debate until 2016. Helping Reagan were allegations that his aides secretly negotiated with Iran to delay the release of US hostages until after the election. Sure enough, on January 20, 1981, minutes after Reagan gave his inaugural address, Iran announced the hostages’ release. His administration would spend much of its second half mired in the Iran-Contra scandal.

‘Dewey Defeats Truman’

🔸 Becoming president in April 1945 after FDR’s death, Harry Truman managed to make a big enough mess of domestic and foreign policy by the 1948 race that every major pollster predicted victory for his GOP opponent, Thomas Dewey.

Sentiments that Truman’s opponent would emerge victorious were so strong that the Chicago Daily Tribune ran with the headline ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’. The photo of Truman holding up the paper and smiling in a press conference became iconic, and the upset showed that sometimes, pollsters can be dead wrong. Still, after four more years, Truman left office in 1953 as one of America’s least popular presidents.

👉 Part 2

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

Top five most surprising presidential upsets in US history

Part 2 👉 Part 1

Defeat at dusk, victory at sunrise

🔸 In 1916, the Woodrow Wilson presidency was in the dumps, with pundits naming GOP opponent Charles Evans Hughes the favorite and predicting a blowout.

Wilson’s detractors seemed to have guessed right, with Hughes sweeping the vote-heavy northeast and taking 254 electoral votes – just a dozen fewer than needed to win, on election night. Newspapers ran stories like “Hughes Wins in Heavy Vote” and referred to him as “president-elect.” But counting in western states ultimately pushed Wilson over the top to victory.

Surprise, you’re the nominee!

🔸 President Hayes’ decision in 1880 not to seek a second term thrust the GOP into chaos, with 14 candidates vying to replace him, including Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, Congressman James Blaine and Treasury head John Sherman. Splitting the party, frontrunners turned the GOP’s June into a madhouse, with no consensus reached after 33 ballots.

Finally, Congressman James Garfield, who wasn’t seeking the nomination, began picking up votes, clinching the nomination in the 36th ballot. Garfield went on to defeat his rival – William Scott Hancock, in November, but his presidency was cut short by a disgruntled ex-supporter who assassinated him after being refused a diplomatic job abroad.

‘Corrupt Bargain’

🔸 In 1824, the two-party system of today was not yet set in stone. In fact, all four candidates that year – Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Senator Andrew Jackson, Treasury chief William Crawford and House Speaker Henry Clay, were members of the Democratic-Republican Party.

No candidate won outright. Instead, in what was has since been characterized as one of the best-known examples of quid-pro-quo corruption, Adams lobbied Clay to transfer his voters’ support to himself in exchange for the secretary of state job. Jackson, who won 99 electoral votes compared to Adams’ 84, and 40.5% of the popular vote compared to Adams’ 32.7%, accused Adams of a “corrupt bargain.”

👉 Part 1

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

❗️Trump is leading in the swing state of Wisconsin with 57.4%, while Harris trails at 41.3% with over 3% of the votes counted.

Thus, at this point of counting, three of the seven swing states (Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina) are behind Trump, two (Michigan and Pennsylvania) are behind Harris, and votes in two more - Arizona and Nevada - have not yet been counted.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt

President Biden ‘can still do a great deal of damage’ between now and January 20

Throwing aside comparisons of the potential pros and cons of the next US president, it’s important to remember that between now and January 20, 2025, when Joe Biden’s successor formally takes office, the outgoing commander-in-chief can do a great deal of harm both domestically and internationally, whether it’s in Ukraine, the Middle East, or elsewhere, says veteran US and international politics expert Joe Siracusa.

“You know, there are a lot of things at stake here, a lot of reputations. And a lot of people in Washington don’t want to see Donald Trump come in because he looks like he’s going to change the rules of the game and they don’t want to change the rules of the game…I mean a lot of these intelligence agencies, the foreign policy elite and the political elite, they’re just doing their own thing and the American people follow suit,” Siracusa told Sputnik.

📌Subscribe to @SputnikInt