What We Learned From The Presidential Hangers On

Plus how we're planning to speak to the 2024 election

Hello, and welcome to the Official This Day in Esoteric Political History Newsletter (yes, we found a way to make the name even longer).

As we’ve been saying on the show, we will soon be re-launching the newsletter in a way that we’re really excited about. More on that next week. In the meantime, please spread the word by forwarding this email, or subscribe if someone forwarded it to you!

For now, we¹ wanted to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re thinking about this election season. This is a historical podcast, we won’t dive into the 2024 race. Rather than talk ABOUT the election, we want to find stories that speak TO the election.

An election season, even one as strange as this one, has a predictable rhythm. So, throughout 2024 we’re going to do a bunch of special weeks that are tied to some of those key moments in an election year calendar.

Some of the ideas we’ve been kicking around:

• Veepstakes Week

• Third Party Week

• Conventions Week

• Weird Ads Week

• Exhaustion Week

• October Surprise Week

We recently concluded the first of these special: Hangers On Week. Here’s how it came together.

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2024 was the rare year in which both parties’ primary processes proved to be pretty much perfunctory. Which had us thinking a lot about the candidates who ran, and kept running, anyway, even after defeat is all but assured.

Naturally, when it came time to name some dudes (and a couple women), we knew we had to bring in Amy Walter, the Cook Political Report Editor-in-Chief and one of our favorite election junkies.

When we first emailed her about the “hangers on” idea, she immediately wrote back with a breakdown of the various paths a presidential bid can take:

So, we had Amy on for the first two episodes of Hangers On Week, taking a spin through some of those recent examples; then focusing on the Republican candidates who foreshadowed the rise of the Trump coalition; then diving into Jesse Jackson’s impact on the modern Democratic Party over the course of two failed runs in the 1980s.

To wrap it up, we went the farthest back into history, discussing the Democratic Convention of 1924 and the candidacy of Al Smith.

In the end, here was Jody’s take about the power of the hanger-on:

As I think about this series that we've been doing and the kind of lessons of people who run and run but don't necessarily get the nomination… A lot of times what these candidates do is they point out coalitions that may not have existed before. They actually are showing the party, beyond policy, a kind of demographic and a group of voters.

100 years ago, Al Smith kept fighting, campaigning as a fractured party pushed past the 100th ballot, as a representative of a growing urban, racially diverse bloc of voters. Smith went home a loser, as did Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and 55! other candidates who got a vote at some point during the testy proceedings before John W. Davis (earning his first and probably last TDP mention) emerged as the Democrats’ compromise choice.

But the big winner that summer? A Smith backer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave a rousing convention speech in his biggest political appearance since becoming paralyzed from the waist down. FDR would ultimately become the banner carrier for a new Democratic Party in 1932.

Fifty-some years later, Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition proved the value of expanding the party’s tent once again. More recently, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee discovered a vein of nativist populism, particularly in the Midwest, which Donald Trump would seize upon in 2016 (supposedly after reading a book by Santorum!).

Will Nikki Haley have a role in the next evolution of the Republican Party (or at least a memorable convention speech coda)? Or will she recede onto the list of forgotten contenders, only to have her name rattled off at cocktail parties forevermore…

Time will tell. For now, we’re on to our next bit of esoteric history, including some more fun with FDR in our most recent episode.

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Even More Esoterica

A thought or some links or something else to get you thinking…

• There’s a lot of rhetoric about today’s border crisis. Like a lot! So we were glad to see Eli Saslow travel to Arivaca, Ariz., to put a series of human faces on the situation for The New York Times, even if solutions remain frustratingly elusive.

• We get a lot of notes from international listeners (hello!) interested in coverage of other countries’ past with a similar focus on the little known and misremembered. Whether you’re British or not, we think you’ll enjoy The Rest of History, and particularly their recent series on England’s mid-1970s’ tumult.

• We recently noted the 91st anniversary of Congress’ proposal to repeal prohibition in 1933, and Jody quipped about the fact that every city seems to have a bar named after the 21st amendment. He’s not wrong…

  

  Screenshot taken by Boston-based researcher Jacob Feldman, who somehow has not yet found himself at the local 21st.

  … but credit to Spokane, Wa., and listener Scott, who made us aware of the fact that there they have an even more esoterically named Volstead Act bar. In fact, we may need to put together a map of the best bars in America, ranked solely based on how obscure the political moment they’re named after is. Let us know if you have a nomination!

Thanks for listening! And for writing in. If you have any ideas for

Have a great week, everyone. We’ll talk to you soon.

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1. “We” is Jody Avirgan and Jacob Feldman, our research — who is also taking the lead on the newsletter initiative. But throughout the year you’ll hear from Jody, Jacob, Niki, Kellie, producer Brittani Brown, and lots of special friends of the show. It’s a family affair!