1892 United States presidential election in North Dakota: Difference between revisions

The 1892 United States presidential election in North Dakota took place on November 8, 1892. As North Dakota had been admitted to the Union as the 39th state on November 2, 1889, this was the first presidential election in which North Dakota cast electoral votes. All contemporary 44 states were part of the 1892 United States presidential election. Voters chose three electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president.

In 1892, the North Dakota Democratic Party and People’s Party conducted a fusion ticket.^[1] In North Dakota, the Fusionists’ opponents were the Republican nominees, incumbent President Benjamin Harrison of Indiana and his running mate Whitelaw Reid of New York.

As was the case in this era, voters in North Dakota chose electors individually rather than as a slate.^[2] While it was a Fusion elector who earned the most votes with 17,700, the 17,519 recorded by the top Republican elector was enough to edge out the lowest vote-getting Fusion elector for third place overall. This created a split delegation of electors. Ultimately, the Fusion electors split their votes (one for Weaver and one for Democratic president-elect Grover Cleveland) while the Republican elector duly voted for the defeated incumbent Harrison.^[3] This is the only time in a US presidential election that a state has equally distributed its electoral votes between three candidates. A state had only cast electoral votes for 3 different candidates twice before, in 1824 (New York cast votes for four) and 1872, the latter due to the death of Horace Greeley. Since 1892, the only time a state has cast electoral votes for more than two candidates was in 2016, when both Washington and Texas did so. However, both of those situations involved faithless electors, meaning this remains (as of 2025) the last time a state’s voters duly elected presidential electors who vote more or less as pledged for three different candidates.