Grover Cleveland Democratic Benjamin Harrison Republican The 1888 United States presidential election in Kentucky took place on November 6, 1888.

Ever since the Civil War, Kentucky had been shaped politically by divisions created by that war between secessionist, Democratic counties and Unionist, Republican ones,[1] although the state as a whole leaned Democratic throughout this era and the GOP would never carry the state during the Third Party System at either presidential[2] or gubernatorial level.

[3] What would become a long-lived partisan system[1] after the state was freed from the direct control of former Confederates would not be seriously affected by the first post-war insurgency movement – that of the Greenback Party at the tail end of the 1870s in the secessionist Jackson Purchase region.

[3] Incumbent president Grover Cleveland lost four points on his 1884 performance, but still carried the state comfortably against GOP nominee Benjamin Harrison.

As of the 2020 presidential election[update], this is the last occasion when a Democratic presidential candidate passed thirty percent in rock-ribbed Unionist and Republican Clinton County.