Benjamin Harrison Republican Grover Cleveland Democratic Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 8, 1892.

Furious, he sent a letter to Ellery Anderson, who headed the New York Reform Club, to condemn the party's apparent drift towards inflation and agrarian control, the "dangerous and reckless experiment of free, unlimited coinage of silver at our mints."

After making his position clear, he worked to focus his campaign on tariff reform, hoping that the silver issue would dissipate.

Hill had unofficially begun to run for president as early as 1890, and even offered former Postmaster General Donald M. Dickinson his support for the vice-presidential nomination.

But he was not able to escape his past association with Tammany Hall, and lack of confidence in his ability to defeat Cleveland for the nomination kept Hill from attaining the support he needed.

By the time of the convention, Cleveland could count on the support of a majority of the state Democratic parties, though his native New York remained pledged to Hill.

[5] In a narrow first-ballot victory, Cleveland received 617.33 votes, barely 10 more than needed, to 114 for Hill, 103 for Governor Horace Boies of Iowa, a populist and former Republican, and the rest scattered.

At the same time, it was hoped that his nomination represented a promise not to ignore regulars, and so potentially get Hill and Tammany Hall to support the Democratic ticket to their fullest in the election.

Privately, Harrison did not want to be renominated for the presidency, but he remained opposed to the nomination of Blaine, who he was convinced intended to run, and thought himself the only candidate capable of preventing that.

Blaine refused to run actively, but the cryptic nature of his responses to a draft effort fueled speculation that he was not averse to such a movement.

For his part, Harrison curtly demanded that he either renounce his supporters or resign as secretary of state, with Blaine doing the latter a scant three days before the National Convention.

[9] Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who had been the leading candidate for the nomination at the 1888 Republican Convention before Harrison won it, was also brought up as a possible challenger.

This inevitably turned attention to Ohio Governor William McKinley, who was indecisive about his intentions despite his ill feeling toward Harrison and popularity among the Republican base.

Mary Elizabeth Lease, William A. Peffer, Jerry Simpson, and James B. Weaver toured the south in support of the agrarian third party.

[13] Alva Adams, Edward Bellamy, Robert Beverly, Marion Cannon, Ignatius L. Donnelly, James G. Field, Walter Q. Gresham, James H. Kyle, C. W. Macune, Mann Page, Leonidas L. Polk, Terence V. Powderly, Leland Stanford, William M. Stewart, Alson Streeter, Ben Terrell, Thomas E. Watson, Weaver, and Charles Van Wyck were speculated as possible presidential candidates.

While his nomination brought with it significant campaigning experience from over several decades, he also had a longer track record that Republicans and Democrats could criticize, and alienated many potential supporters in the South, having participated in Sherman's March to the Sea.

James G. Field of Virginia was nominated for vice president in an attempt to rectify this problem while also attaining the regional balance often seen in Republican and Democratic tickets.

[17] The Populist platform called for nationalization of the telegraph, telephone, and railroads, free coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, and creation of postal savings banks.

[28] A "national nominating convention of woman suffragists" met on September 21, 1892, and nominated notorious suffrage and former free-love advocate (at the time, "free love" meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference[29]) Victoria Woodhull for president and Marietta Stow for vice president.

[33] It was believed that Calvin S. Brice, the current chair of the Democratic National Committee, would seek reelection, but he declined and William F. Harrity was selected without opposition.

For his part, Cleveland assured voters that he opposed absolute free trade and would continue his campaign for a reduction in the tariff.

Stevenson launched his campaign activities in his hometown of Bloomington, Illinois, and traveled across Delaware, North Carolina, and Virginia for sixteen days.

In East Tennessee and tidewater Virginia, the vote at the county level showed some strength, but it barely existed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas.

As of 2024, Cleveland was the fourth of eight presidential nominees to win a significant number of electoral votes in at least three elections, the others being Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump.

In a continuation of its collapse there during the 1890 congressional elections, the Republican Party even struggled in its Midwestern strongholds, where general electoral troubles from economic woes were acutely exacerbated by the promotion of temperance laws and, in Wisconsin and Illinois, the aggressive support of state politicians for English-only compulsory education laws.

Such policies, which particularly in the case of the latter were associated with an upwelling of nativist and anti-Catholic attitudes amongst their supporters, resulted in the defection of large sections of immigrant communities, especially Germans, to the Democratic Party.

Cleveland carried Wisconsin and Illinois with their 36 combined electoral votes, a Democratic victory not seen in those states since 1852[50] and 1856[51] respectively, and which would not be repeated until Woodrow Wilson's election in 1912.

While not as dramatic a loss as in 1890, it would take until the next election cycle for more moderate Republican leaders to pick up the pieces left by the reformist crusaders and bring alienated immigrants back to the fold.

Populist James B. Weaver, calling for free coinage of silver and an inflationary monetary policy, received such strong support in the West that he became the only third-party nominee between 1860 and 1912 to carry a single state.

Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836–1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.