Grover Cleveland was the first to serve two non-consecutive presidential terms

On By Littum

NEW YORK (AP) – On the list of U.S. presidents, several have been tapped by voters to serve more than one term, with Donald Trump joining the group as the 45th president and now the 47th as well. But only one other US president has done what Trump wants – with a gap of four years between terms.

Donald John Trump has won the 2024 presidential election, marking his return to the White House after serving as the 45th president of the United States.

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

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

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

However, Cleveland remained well thought of by the public. He won both the popular and electoral votes in 1892.

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

“This model of a president being a vocal, clear advocate of 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 in the years following his first term.

“This is a point where the modern notion of the national party really came together. Cleveland had a group of skilled political operators, very wealthy people, who saw themselves benefiting from free trade,” Klinghard said. “And they spent a lot of time to keep Cleveland’s name in front of voters, in a way that Trump’s allies have done, in a way to dismiss anyone else as a challenge — as a rival.”