How One Insult Can Swing an Election

From Irish Catholics in 1884 to Puerto Ricans in 2024?

(Image via Shutterstock)

Every once in a while, an election is so close that a single event late in the race can make all the difference. It’s not typically the case that this event comes in the form of an insult. But it has happened, and it’s always possible it could happen again.

Perhaps even this year.

1884: “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” fires up Irish Catholics in New York

The 1884 presidential race between Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican James Blaine went down to the wire. It was a scandal-tinged contest, with Cleveland accused of fathering a child out of wedlock and Blaine plagued by accusations of corruption. As Election Day approached, Blaine was considered a narrow favorite, with New York being the swing state that seemed to hold the key to the election.

On October 29, while campaigning in New York, Blaine appeared at a meeting of Protestant ministers. The opening speaker was the Rev. Samuel Burchard. In his address, Burchard blasted Democrats with this statement: “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion.”

That statement may seem relatively harmless to our ears, but it sounded quite different in 1884. The “rebellion” in Burchard’s statement referred to continuing partisan divisions over the Civil War two decades earlier. “Rum” was a reference to alcohol, which was popular with immigrants. Taverns populated immigrant enclaves in New York and other urban areas, while more rural and small town Republicans at the time favored a temperance movement.

But the biggest insult of the three was the allusion to “Romanism,” which was an anti-Catholic slur common in the 19th century, not unlike other ethnic slurs you might imagine today. This caused considerable dismay in the Irish Catholic community of New York, where Blaine was pushing for votes. Democrats soon splashed the comment across the city, in newspapers and campaign flyers.

One week later, Blaine lost the vote in New York by just 1,149 votes out of 1.1 million ballots. Cleveland won the national popular vote by 48.5-48.2% and the electoral vote 219-182. If New York, with 36 electoral votes, had gone the other way, Blaine would have become president.

The controversy caused by “Rum, Romanism, and rebellion” was widely thought to have made the difference in the New York vote. Blaine later suggested he would have won the state if “Dr. Burchard had been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or China.”

2024: Could Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania be the Irish Catholics of 140 years ago?

If you follow the news, by now you’ve surely heard of the brouhaha at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. The entire event was a MAGA-fueled bender of vulgarity and racism, but the headline-grabbing remarks came from one of the opening speakers, the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe.

After criticizing Latinos for making too many babies, Hinchcliffe remarked: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

Puerto Ricans weren’t amused.

Shortly afterwards, Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny endorsed Harris.

If you don’t think that’s likely to matter very much, consider that one month ago, the Washington Post ran a feature on Bad Bunny with this headline: “The pop star endorsement that could really swing the election? Bad Bunny.”

One Democratic consultant said such an endorsement “would be like a Thanos-level event.” (If you haven’t seen Marvel movies, well, let’s just say it’d be a big freaking deal.) And a Pennsylvania official thought it might be more impactful than a seal of approval from Taylor Swift.

Why so important? It’s not just Bad Bunny’s immense popularity, especially among Latinos, but also the reality of where most Puerto Ricans live. After Florida and New York, the state with the biggest population is Pennsylvania. There are about 600,000 Latinos who are eligible to vote in Pennsylvania, the majority of them Puerto Ricans. There are smaller but potentially significant numbers of Puerto Ricans in Georgia and North Carolina. And obviously huge numbers of other Latinos in Arizona and Nevada.

It wasn’t just Bad Bunny who expressed dismay. Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, is also Puerto Rican and similarly came out in support of Harris on Sunday. As did singer and Puerto Rico native Ricky Martin, who wrote: "This is what they think about us. Vote for Kamala Harris."

Ariana Grande is not Puerto Rican but Italian American. Nevertheless, the hugely popular singer and actress, with 376 million Instagram followers, also announced on Sunday that she’s voting for Harris.

So yeah, the remarks caused a bit of an uproar. Ironically, it all happened on the same day Harris was campaigning in the Puerto Rican community of Philadelphia.

The potential damage was emphasized by how quickly the Trump campaign tried to distance itself from the comments. But this was undercut by the fact that the remarks were on Hinchcliffe’s teleprompter, and the campaign had removed a different joke in which the comedian was going to call Harris a c*nt. So the Trump people knew what Hinchcliffe was going to say, they just weren’t bothered by it until the outrage grew.

How many votes might be affected by all this? No one knows, of course. But remember that in 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Pennsylvania by a mere 80,000 votes out of nearly seven million ballots. And as of today, Trump’s average polling lead in Pennsylvania is 0.5%. In Nate Silver’s model, Pennsylvania is predicted to be the tipping point state. Without it, Harris’ chances of winning the Electoral College grow considerably more difficult.

Did the Trump campaign just give away Pennsylvania in the name of feeding red meat to the MAGA base? Stay tuned.

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