Electorally speaking, Abraham Lincoln And Woodrow Wilson they are united by the fact that they were elected following and as a consequence of the contingent crisis of the opposing party which, by dividing itself, allowed them to win despite having collected a decidedly lower number of votes than those obtained by their rivals if added together.
In 1860, Lincoln – the first Republican to reach the presidential seat – in fact won just under forty percent of the votes and was surpassed by about three hundred and sixty thousand popular votes in total by the two Democrats (John Breckinridge and Stephen Douglas) among themselves as well as in battle with him. In 2012, he said goodbye to the Republican Party – which proposed the outgoing William Taft – former President Theodore Roosevelt’s attempt to ensure that Democrat Woodrow Wilson won despite not reaching forty-two percent of the vote and collecting approximately one million three hundred thousand fewer votes overall.
Well, if the ‘Ley de lemas’ – simply ‘Lema’ – had been in operation in America, Lincoln and Wilson would be remembered in a few lines among the defeated in the history books. Theorized by Jules Borély (‘Nouveau Système Electoral: Representation proportionelle de la majorité et des minorités’, Paris, 1870) and called ‘Lema’ in the twentieth century in the Latin American countries that adopted it (Argentina, Uruguay in particular and Honduras), the electoral system in question would have resolved the situations previously illustrated with the victory of Stephen Douglas in 1860 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
It provided for within the scope of the Presidential Elections in fact the ‘Ley de Lemas’:
– that each party could present multiple candidates
– that it was verified which group had received the most votes by adding up those of the individuals
– that the position should go to the candidate of the most successful political movement that had prevailed in terms of preferences.
For the sake of completeness, the same cannot be said for other American cases in which, despite a split having occurred, the party that suffered it still won the election: in particular, in 1948 when the Democrats prevailed with Harry Truman even though J. Strom Thurmond had come out to the right.
by Mauro della Porta Raffo
Honorary President of the Italy-USA Foundation
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