U.S. presidential election, 1888

United States presidential election, 1888

← 1884 November 6, 1888 1892 →
All 401 electoral votes of the Electoral College 201 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout	79.3% 1.8 pp
Nominee Benjamin Harrison Grover Cleveland Party Republican Democratic Home state Indiana New York Running mate Levi P. Morton Allen G. Thurman Electoral vote 233 168 States carried 20 18 Popular vote 5,443,892 5,534,488 Percentage 47.8% 48.6%
Presidential election results map. Red denotes those won by Harrison/Morton, blue denotes states won by Cleveland/Thurman. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
President before election Grover Cleveland Democratic Elected President Benjamin Harrison Republican

Grover Cleveland
Democratic

Benjamin Harrison
Republican

The United States presidential election of 1888 was the 26th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 1888. It saw Grover Cleveland of New York, the incumbent president and a Democrat, try to secure a second term against the Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison, a former U.S. Senator from Indiana. The economy was prosperous and the nation was at peace, but Cleveland lost re-election in the Electoral College, even though he won a plurality of the popular vote by a narrow margin.

Tariff policy was the principal issue in the election. Harrison took the side of industrialists and factory workers who wanted to keep tariffs high, while Cleveland strenuously denounced high tariffs as unfair to consumers. Cleveland's opposition to Civil War pensions and inflated currency also made enemies among veterans and farmers. On the other hand, he held a strong hand in the South and border states, and appealed to former Republican Mugwumps.

Harrison swept almost the entire North and Midwest (losing only Connecticut and New Jersey), and narrowly carried the swing states of New York (Cleveland's home state) and Indiana (Harrison's home state) by a margin of 1% or less to achieve a majority of the electoral vote. Unlike the election of 1884, the power of the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City helped deny Cleveland the electoral votes of his home state.