The1880 United States presidential election in Georgia took place on November 2, 1880, as part of the wider United States presidential election. Voters chose 11 representatives, or electors, to theElectoral College, who voted forpresident andvice president.
Following Reconstruction, Georgia would be the first former Confederate state to substantially disenfranchise its newly enfranchised freedmen and manypoor whites, doing so in the early 1870s.[1] This largely limited the Republican Party to a fewNorth Georgia counties with substantialCivil WarUnionist sentiment – chieflyFannin but also to a lesser extentPickens,Gilmer andTowns[2] – and in presidential elections to a small number of counties elsewhere where blacks were not fully disenfranchised. The Democratic Party served as the guardian ofwhite supremacy against a Republican Party historically associated with memories ofReconstruction, and the main competition becameDemocratic primaries, which were restricted to whites on the grounds of the Democratic Party being legally a private club.[3] This restriction was done by local county laws, but combined with the highly efficacious cumulativepoll tax introduced in 1877 meant that turnout would begin a decline to be consistently lower than any other former Confederate state except South Carolina.[4]
Despite the failure of outgoing PresidentRutherford B. Hayes to convert any of the formerlyWhig landowners to the GOP,[5] Democratic nomineeWinfield Scott Hancock declined by seven percent uponSamuel J. Tilden’s performance in Georgia from 1876, as mountain country whites who could pay the poll tax were nonetheless dissatisfied with the spending cuts of the “Redeemers” and their economic problems fromdeflation and aregressive and malapportioned tax system.[5]
^Springer, Melanie Jean;How the States Shaped the Nation: American Electoral Institutions and Voter Turnout, 1920-2000, p. 155ISBN022611435X
^Kousser, J. Morgan;The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, p. 213ISBN0-300-01973-4
^abKousser;The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 17-18
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