Does it seem to you like recent presidential campaigns have gone on forever?
That may be so, but as Truth 4 points out, Nothing’s new: Everything that happened in the past will happen again.
According to NPR’s On The Media, we’ve had long, long presidential campaigns since the 1820s, when Martin Van Buren went around the country getting pro-Andrew Jackson newspapers started immediately following the 1824 presidential election.
Historian Michael Kazin tells On The Media that the longest presidential campaign on record was that of William Jennings Bryan, who started his presidential campaign for the 1900 election immediately after he lost the 1896 vote.
- The link above is to a transcript of the program. If you’d rather listen to streaming audio of it, you can find that here.