We've been here before.
A two-term incumbent, once unpopular but looking better and better to his critics as his time runs out, is about to leave office. He has brought a controversial end to an unpopular war. His secretary of state, who is not particularly well-liked, is nevertheless nominated to succeed him, even though critics say that the candidate will just continue a political dynasty and has been cozying up to bankers who care only about profits. The opposition, fractured by dissent, finds itself unable to run a serious convention, and winds up fielding a weak but wealthy candidate who hails from New York.
Welcome to 1816. Two hundred years ago, the nation faced an election with striking similarities to the present moment.
Let's set the scene: President James Madison has managed to escape office without quite losing the War of 1812. His Democratic-Republican party nominates James Monroe, the secretary of state and a member of the Virginia dynasty that supplied four of the first five presidents.
The opposition Federalist Party is coming apart at the seams. The Federalists nominate Rufus King in what is universally expected to be a losing cause. The leaders of the broken party therefore focus on what we today call down-ballot races, in a desperate effort to save what they could.
To be sure, the parallels between 1816 and 2016 are far from perfect. For one thing, nobody was surprised by the Federalist collapse.
King was a weak candidate, but hardly a farcical one. He was not bombastic, unmannered or self-aggrandizing; he was no Donald Trump.
On many of the big issues of his day, King was on the right side. As he aged, he battled the expansion of slavery with increasing fervor. But history is a vast memory hole, and King has been largely forgotten.
As an outsider, I am in no position to give worried Republicans any advice. But they should at least ponder the lingering lesson of the election of two centuries ago. Had the Federalists seriously contested the presidency, they most assuredly would have lost anyway. But they might have remained a party.
Instead, they abandoned the field to the winner, and were never heard from again. •
Stephen L. Carter is a professor of law at Yale University and a Bloomberg View columnist.