Thread by @ryangrim

For bedtime, @irisgrim and I’ve been reading this CSPAN history of the presidents and it’s remarkable what bad luck the left — broadly and imperfectly defined — has had when it comes to mortality.

The first president to die in office, the Whig William Henry Harrison, was the first to run a modern campaign, even drawing 100k people to a rally, like 1/2 the damn population at the time. Women for the first time were a major part of his campaign and he ousted Jackson’s protege

Martin Van Buren. He died in a month and was replaced by the slavery-loving Democrat John Tyler, who was later elected to serve in the Confederate Congress

Then 8 years later the Whigs manage to elect Zachary Taylor, who surprising everybody by being a strong opponent of the Slave Power, threatens war with Texas and threatens to hang Jefferson Davis for treason

He does too, replaced by the wretched Millard Fillmore. Whigs had not learned their lesson.

Then 1865 wasn’t bad luck: a Confederate conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln was successful. But the Whigs-turned-GOP still hadn’t learned their lesson, and Andrew Johnson takes over

At Lincoln’s memorials, lots of prominent politicians referred to his assassination as the third — certain the Slave Power had also killed Harrison and Taylor, though the evidence doesn’t back that up.

Then Garfield is elected in 1880, after running post-Reconstruction as an explicit supporter of black civil rights. He dies his first year, replaced by Chester Arthur, who did not feel similarly.

You could argue the first one to go the other way came when an anarchist

shot McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt took over, launching the Progressive Era.

I don’t really have a point, just an interesting thing to add to all the structural right wing tilt already built in.