r/todayilearned • u/GeoJono • 1d ago
TIL that the last U.S. President who was neither a Democrat nor a Republican was Millard Fillmore, the final Whig Party President, who served in the executive office from July 1850 to March 1853.
https://buffaloah.com/h/fillmore/MF.html31
u/eatingpotatochips 1d ago
He's the only president with a double consonant in his first and last name.
Unfortunately, that's one of the more memorable things about him.
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u/Old-butt-new 1d ago
Two party system lame af
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u/Cultural-Company282 1d ago
Each of the two parties is a conglomeration of people with disparate interests coming together to form a de facto coalition government. If we had a multi-party system like, say, Italy, it wouldn't functionally change things. The people who stick together and call themselves Democrats and Republicans today would still stick together but would just call themselves by a variety of other party names.
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u/mnimatt 1d ago
This is such an oversimplified way to explain it. The two party system and the first past the post, winner takes all voting system means we can only have 2 real candidates for every presidential election. It also means that the Democratic party leadership and fundraisers have total control over the entire progressive side in this country. Same for Republicans and conservatives.
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u/Old-butt-new 1d ago
I know, its all just so lame and icky and nothing we can really do about it
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u/NotWhiteCracker 4h ago
Ranked choice voting, banning corporate political donations, and allowing all parties an equal chance to debate are easy solutions
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u/ProfessionalEgg40 14h ago
Oh, we CAN do some things about it. We've just been conditioned to accept the cage instead of fighting for the key.
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u/Millard_Fillmore00 1d ago
I could have told you that
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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 1d ago
I would like to subscribe to Mallard Filmore Facts please.
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u/leeharveyteabag669 1d ago
Was there a TV show with Millard Fillmore High School in it?
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u/rtels2023 21h ago
While the Whigs were one of the two major parties at the time, after his presidency Fillmore became one of the most successful third party candidates in US history when he ran for a full term as President in 1856 as the nominee of the American Party, more commonly known as the Know Nothing Party.
The Know Nothings were a nativist and populist political movement in the 1850s that opposed immigration, especially Catholic immigration. They grew out of the collapse of the Whig Party, and for a time seemed as if they could succeed the Whigs as the second major party, but as slavery became the primary issue in American politics, they were surpassed by the anti-slavery Republicans and ended up falling apart as different factions of the party had wide differences of opinion on slavery.
In the 1856 Election, Fillmore got 21.5% of the vote and won the state of Maryland. That‘s the second-highest popular vote total of any third party candidate, behind only Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, who got 27.4% of the vote as the nominee of the Progressive Party. It also makes Fillmore one of only 10 third party candidates in US history to win at least one state.
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1d ago
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u/disdain7 1d ago
Umm…I don’t like the guy either but what does this have to do with the post?
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u/Pinksters 1d ago
If you go into their profile you'll see they inject trump into everything possible. I searched for Trump and it pulled up 144 results in the last 26 days.
People say TDS isn't real but there's the proof.
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u/ezekiellake 1d ago
I can’t remember to be honest. It seemed logical at the time, but I was pretty tired.
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u/MikeTalonNYC 1d ago
Kind of. The Whig Party is generally considered to have evolved into the Republican Party - which didn't exist prior to that point of merging.
So the statement is very much true, but most of the goals, philosophies, and platforms of the Whigs were what we'd see today as Republican - they just didn't use that specific name until later.