Big Brains and the Solid South: The Role of the Press in the Election of 1880

ABSTRACT The US presidential election of 1880 provides an opportunity to examine the dynamic role of the nineteenth-century press in defining the candidates, implementing campaign tactics, and constructing an ideological battlefield for the campaign. The coverage demonstrates that the press engaged in tactics that remain staples of electoral communication strategy: constructing candidates via a campaign biography, engineering a bandwagon effect by repeatedly invoking the popularity of the candidate, disseminating qualified endorsements, calling for voter turnout, and adopting a rhetoric of victory. It was also in 1880, the research shows, that the construct of the Solid South came to the fore, denoting, in the case of the Democratic press, the political and economic reemergence of the region in the wake of Reconstruction or, in the case of the Republican press, a reactionary crystallization of Southern interests.