Election to the United States House of Representatives in 1896

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On November 3, 1896, the House of Representatives in the United States was elected. Elections in three countries took place between June and September. The election was part of the general election to the 55th United States Congress that year, which also elected a third of US Senators . The 1896 presidential election , won by Republican William McKinley , also took place at the same time .

At the time of the election, the United States consisted of 45 states. The number of MPs to be elected was 357. The distribution of seats was based on the 1890 census .

In the elections, the Democrats recovered slightly from the heavy losses they suffered two years earlier. With a gain of 31 seats, they now had 124 seats in the House of Representatives. But that meant they remained in the opposition. The Republicans lost 48 seats but retained their absolute majority with 206 seats. The Populist Party reached the height of its political existence. It gained 13 seats and now held 22 seats. The reason for the noticeable change in favor of the Democrats during the elections was, on the one hand, the improvement in the economic situation. The crisis of 1893 that led to the democratic defeat in 1894 was over. Now the Democrats have managed to win back some of the then-lost constituencies from the Republicans. There was also a split in the Republican Party. The so-called Silver Republican Party , which was mainly present in the western states, stood up for the silver and metal currency , while the actual Republican Party wanted to maintain the gold standard .

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: 357 (357)

The results of the last election two years earlier are in brackets. Changes during the legislative period that do not affect the elections themselves are not included in these figures, but are noted in the article on the 55th 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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