Lecture Highlights Presidential Election History

HACKETTSTOWN — As a Boy Scout troop leader and history professor, the educator said it was his sworn duty to tell the truth — the truth about presidential elections.

Raymond Frey, Centenary College historian and history professor, captivated a library full of students, faculty and community members with a lecture on the history of the presidential election Friday. The discussion touched on many topics, including the necessity of the Electoral College, dirty campaigning, inaccurate pollsters and unforeseen snags in the voting process that have all shaped the presidential election of today.

In 1800, a blip in the Electoral College voting process held up the naming of the United States' third president. The Federalists nominated John Adams for president and Charles Pinckney for vice president; the Democratic-Republicans nominated Thomas Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice president.

Frey said the candidate with the most electoral votes would be elected president and the candidate with the second most votes would be vice president; however, Jefferson and Burr received the same number of electoral votes. It was up to the House of Representatives to decide a tie. After voting 36 times, the House eventually voted Jefferson president.

The immediate aftermath resulted in a constitutional amendment requiring "double balloting," where voters vote for a president and vice president "package," Frey said.

Frey also discussed reasons discouraging a direct popular vote.

"Who the hell is going to campaign in Montana?" he proposed. "No one."

Frey said Electoral College voting "puts the small states back into play."

"You're going to wear the moose antlers and eat buffalo meat; you're going to go; you need those three (Electoral College) votes," he said.

Frey used the 2000 election as an example. George W. Bush would have tried to win Texas to offset Al Gore's votes in New York and neither would have vied for smaller states' votes, he said.

"It would be as if we changed the World Series from a system in which a team must win four games to one (where the) total of runs in all games played determines the victory," Frey said.

Frey said the election of 1860 "is where the electoral vote can do weird things."

Because the Democratic Party was split three ways, the lone Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was elected with less than 40 percent of the popular vote.

"And Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in 10 Southern states," Frey said.

One hundred years later, Frey said, the first televised debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, forever "changed the game" of the presidential election.

"Then it became really a matter of ‘What does the president look like? How does he carry himself?' His demeanor and facial expressions," Frey said. "It's more about how they look than what they actually said."

Frey said Americans began voting on personality.

"Would I have a beer with him? Would I let him watch my kids?" he asked. "Americans also do that."

Frey said it will be difficult for Republican nominee Mitt Romney to connect with the working man as a man of wealth.

"That's tough," he said.

Frey then said he is always asked about mudslinging, so he chose to highlight the "dirtiest presidential campaigns," starting with Jefferson, who was called a "mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father," in the 1800 election.

Frey concluded with what he called the "dirtiest campaign commercial ever." He showed a terrifying commercial from the 1964 election that featured a little girl picking a daisy, which transitioned into the explosion of an atomic bomb. The ad urged voters to choose Lyndon Johnson, implying that Barry Goldwater would get America into a nuclear war.

"I think this election is a little more civil, but it's early," Frey said.

A student then asked for the professor's prediction for the 2012 race.

"I predict that the election will be decided in the last two weeks," Frey said. "I don't see a blowout. I see it very close and it's going to be right down to the end."

"So stay tuned," he said.