When political strategist Karl Rove spoke in Washington last week, he was reluctant to talk about the 2016 presidential race. His most extensive comment to a packed crowd at the American Enterprise Institute was to say that the Republican nominee should emphasize “economic security” for everyone, safety from attack, and national unity.
Rove stuck to his topic, William McKinley and his path to winning the presidency in 1896, about which he has written a superb book, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters. That election is famous for the political realignment it created and the 36-year Republican era that followed.
But Rove achieves something new. He elevates McKinley’s status to that of a historically important president. “Historians and political scientists mark other electoral realignments with the names of the presidents who brought them about—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR—yet have overlooked the man who brought about a new party system in 1896,” Rove writes. He corrects this error.
He also clarifies, once and for all, who was in charge of the McKinley campaign. It was McKinley, not Mark Hanna. Most of Hanna’s advice was bad, though he was a great fundraiser. McKinley’s wisest campaign adviser was a young lawyer from Nebraska named Charles Dawes, later President Coolidge’s vice president and a 1925 Nobel Prize winner.
In his book, Rove doesn’t offer specific advice for Republicans today. But the political adviser to President George W. Bush does say this: “McKinley’s campaign matters more than a century later because it provides lessons either party could use today to end an era of a 50-50 nation and gain an edge for a durable period.”
The lessons are found in the closing chapter, in which Rove spells out “eight reasons for McKinley’s victory.” My guess is Republicans are more likely than Democrats to pay attention to these lessons, as well they should.
“The first is that [McKinley] conducted a campaign based on big issues.” McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee, were principled men who focused on “consequential issues in ways that drew sharp distinctions.” The GOP nominee in 2016 shouldn’t have trouble doing this, since the party wants the next president to reverse nearly everything President Obama has done.
The second reason is McKinley attacked Bryan’s “supposed strength,” his advocacy of a currency inflated by unlimited coinage of silver. This gave Democrats “an enormous advantage” and made Bryan the “candidate of change,” Rove writes. That is, until McKinley “realized the old political truth that what a candidate thinks is his strong point is often an Achilles heel. Attack it, and his campaign is crippled.”
The strength of Democrats now is the notion they “care” about people and Republicans don’t. Republicans need to show that the vast amounts of government spending Democrats favor do more harm than good. This is a tough case to make, but easier given the stagnant economy.
Reason three for his victory is that McKinley “was a different kind of Republican who recognized his party must broaden and modernize its appeal or it would lose,” Rove writes. This should be obvious, since George W. Bush won with this strategy in 2000. Rove also notes the McKinley managers “did not delude themselves that there were millions of stay-at-home Republicans” who would suddenly decide to vote.
Number four: McKinley “broadened the electoral battlefield.” But he did this only after overcoming the “natural inclination for a campaign to focus first on defense,” protecting the party’s safe states. Once McKinley switched to offense, he “flipped ten states Democrats had won in 1892 and two states Populists carried then,” Rove writes. To match McKinley, this year’s Republican nominee will have to win states that normally vote Democratic in presidential contests but now have GOP governors or legislatures. New Jersey, Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, even Illinois, come to mind.
The fifth reason is McKinley “ran for the nomination as an outsider, undercutting the traditional role played by party bosses.” Powerful party bosses no longer exist. But McKinley further took steps in the primary, with “consequences for both the general election and the country’s entire political system in the years that followed.” He rejected “anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant appeals [and] reached out to black voters and championed their rights.” The lesson here is pretty straightforward.
The sixth reason for McKinley’s victory: He was seen as “a candidate of change.” Protectionism and opposition to free silver “allowed him to portray himself as the leader who would change the country’s direction and heal the economy,” Rove writes. A Republican candidate in 2016 who cannot credibly run as a leader for change will surely lose.
Reason seven is McKinley “ran as a unifier, adopting the language of national reconciliation.” Hillary Clinton tried this in the January 17 Democratic debate, citing three issues on which she is a rigid partisan. She failed. Obama succeeded in his 2008 campaign by promising to end bitter partisan divisions in Washington. He didn’t keep the promise. McKinley knew Americans “thirsted for someone who could replace discord and rancor with optimism and unity.” That thirst remains strong in 2016.
Finally, we get to number eight, “the most important reason for McKinley’s victory.” It is the “quality” of his campaign. It was “a critical difference,” Rove writes, “and the size and scope of past efforts to win the White House paled in comparison to that of McKinley’s men.” His insistence on campaigning from his front porch was a brilliant stroke. His words “filled the nation’s papers each day, reaching voters hundreds of miles from [his] front stoop,” Rove writes. That he drew “vast numbers . . . demonstrated the deep backing the Republican enjoyed.”
The McKinley campaign isn’t a blueprint for a Republican campaign in 2016. But it comes pretty close. Presidential candidates who read Rove’s account of how McKinley won will be wiser for taking the trouble.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
