Grover Cleveland Democratic Benjamin Harrison Republican The 1888 United States presidential election in Virginia took place on November 6, 1888, as part of the 1888 United States presidential election.

The contest in Virginia was very close and Cleveland narrowly won the state by a margin of just 0.53 percentage points.

This was the closest the Republican Party came to winning an ex-Confederate state between the Compromise of 1877 and Warren G. Harding’s 1920 win in Tennessee, and with Virginia voting 0.30 points more Republican than the nation at-large, would also prove the last time any former Confederate state voted more Republican than the nation until Virginia itself did so in 1952.

This election represented the height of the expanded Reconstruction Era electorate.

So complete was to be the disfranchisement of Virginia's lower classes with the new Constitution of 1902[1] that it was 1952, with a much larger population, before the electorate returned to the same numbers observed in 1888.