llion votes and 22 votes in the unique American system called the Electoral College. Furthermore, the Populists, in 1892, also garnered enough support to send 10 representatives to the House, 5 to the US Senate, and had enough votes at the state level, predominately in the Midwest of course, to elect 3 Governors and 1500 members to state legislatures. But the electoral dreams of the Populists could not be met. As is true throughout American history, third party groups never seem able to reach out successfully to natural partners. The Populists had much in common with their working class brethren stuffed in the eastern factories. They, too, of course, suffered many injustices from the system that the farmers in the west were fighting. But on Election Day, the Omaha Platform did not chisel the laborers from their traditional voting patterns, and another reform party failed to overthrow the system. It is so common in America as to be axiomatic: the nation embraces so thoroughly the myth of a classes society that they fail, we fail, to join together to fight the forces which dominate and subjugate a majority of the people. In 1886, in a sad attempt to join a party that could win, the Populist Party endorsed the Democratic candidacy of William Jennings Bryan. Although the south refused to go along, the western states of the Populist Partya majoritythrew their support to the major candidate who embraced their ideas about currency reform. After a highly emotional campaign centering on the money issue, Bryan lost. The election and the Electoral College were decided by regional biases, with Bryan not winning a single urban, industrial state; the workers of the north could not deliver a single state north of the Potomac and east of the Mississippi. While the western movement stamped the emergence of the west as a political force entering the twentieth century, (Lincoln and Jackson were both from the geographic west but were not reall...
