Conventional wisdom has it that the 2016 presidential campaign has no parallel in American history. Such wisdom would point to the first female to head a major-party ticket. It would note the first billionaire populist as a major party's presumptive nominee. There might even be a reference to the high negatives and general aroma of untrustworthiness emanating from both campaigns.
Conventionally speaking, all of this insight is entirely on the mark. But speaking of conventional things, the 2016 race might find its parallel yet, in the extraordinary presidential election of 1912.
Briefly, the circumstances were these. Theodore Roosevelt, having won election to the presidency in 1904, promised that he would not seek re-election in 1908. No one, he thought, should hold the office longer than George Washington's eight years. And by 1908 Roosevelt would have been president for nearly that long, having succeeded to the office from the vice presidency upon President William McKinley's assassination in 1901.
By 1908, Roosevelt had come to regret his pledge, but he kept it.
Fast-forward to 1912. By then Roosevelt had come to regret something else, namely his decision to anoint William Howard Taft as his preferred successor. Convinced that Taft as president was insufficiently progressive, Roosevelt returned from a nearly yearlong African safari to eventually make another decision: He would challenge Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912.
The heart of that challenge was the then-infant primary election process. Roosevelt won most of the state primaries, but there weren't enough of them at the time to make a difference. Taft forces controlled the party machinery and the convention, including what were the "superdelegates" of that era — and the nomination was his.
TR now had another decision to make. Managing (without great difficulty) to convince himself that the convention had been rigged against him, he decided to organize a third party. Under the banner of the suddenly formed Progressive Party, Roosevelt took to the fall campaign against Taft, Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson and Socialist Party standard-bearer Eugene Debs.
Wilson, of course, was victorious. In truth, TR undertook his crusade convinced that this would be the result. Nonetheless, he decided that it was important to fight the good fight for his version of progressivism anyway. Dividing the Republican Party — and costing his party the White House in the process — was worth it. Or so TR surmised.
