Trump isn’t first to be second: Grover Cleveland set precedent of non-consecutive presidential terms

FILE - President Grover Cleveland poses for a photo on Aug. 9, 1892. (AP Photo, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — On the list of U.S. presidents, several have been tapped by voters to serve for more than one term, with Donald Trump joining the group as the 45th president and now the 47th, too. But only one other American president did it the way Trump will — with a gap of four years between terms.

That was Grover Cleveland, who served as the 22nd president after the 1884 election, and as the 24th president after the campaign of 1892.

Cleveland was governor of New York when he was tapped as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1884. He was “viewed as the epitome of responsibility and stability,” said Daniel Klinghard, professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachussetts.

A narrow victory in the popular vote gave him enough votes in the Electoral College to be named president. Four years later, even though he once again had a slight lead in the popular vote, he lost the Electoral College count to Republican Benjamin Harrison.

Cleveland remained well-thought of by the public, though. He won both the popular and Electoral vote in 1892.

During his first term, among the issues he took on: pushing for a reduction of tariffs that had been put in place during the Civil War. He advocated strongly for it, linking that position to the Democratic Party and getting public support, Klinghard said.

“That model of a president being a vocal, clear spokesperson for a policy that animated the party” was emulated by future presidents like Woodrow Wilson, he said. And it helped keep Cleveland in the public eye during the years following his first term.

“This is a point at which the modern notion of the of the national party really came together. Cleveland had a group of skilled political operatives, very wealthy folks, who saw themselves benefiting from free trade,” Klinghard said. “And they spent a lot of time sort of keeping Cleveland’s name in front of the electorate, sort of very much as Trump’s allies have done, sort of dismissing anybody else as a challenge — as a rival.”