Election to the United States House of Representatives in 1884

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The election to the 1884 House of Representatives took place on November 4, 1884. The House of Representatives was elected in the United States . Elections were held between June 2nd and October 14th in five states. The election was part of the general election for the 49th United States Congress that year, which also elected a third of US Senators . At the same time, the presidential election of 1884 , won by Democrat Grover Cleveland , took place.

At the time of the election, the United States consisted of 38 states. The number of MPs to be elected was 325. The distribution of seats was based on the 1880 census .

In the elections, the Democrats lost 14 seats, but were able to maintain their absolute majority in the House of Representatives. On the other hand, the Republicans gained 24 seats. The United States Greenback Party , which advocated the permanent use of banknotes (paper money) and which had its voters mainly in agriculture, lost another seat and was now represented by only one member in Congress. The slight swing in favor of the Republicans was related to a brief economic crisis in 1884. Some of the voters believed the Republicans were more economically literate than the Democrats. But that was neither enough to prevent the election of the Democrat Grover Cleveland as president, nor to turn the majority in the House of Representatives. Only in the Senate could the Republicans maintain their majority there.

Only men were entitled to vote and eligible for election. Women were still banned from voting at the federal level until 1920. In the southern states in particular, the right to vote was restricted by laws that linked the right to vote to a certain tax revenue. As a result, poor whites, but above all many African-Americans, were excluded from voting.

Election result

Total: 325 (325)

The results of the last election two years earlier are in brackets. Changes during the legislative period that do not affect the elections as such are not included in these figures, but are noted in the article on the 49th Congress in the section on the members of the House of Representatives under the relevant names of the representatives. The same applies to elections in states that did not join the Union until after the beginning of the legislative period. As a result, the sources sometimes contain different information, as changes during the legislative period were sometimes incorporated into the figures and sometimes not.

See also

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