NEW YORK (AP) — After his unprecedented felony conviction, former President and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump must wait to find out what his sentence will be. But even if it means time behind bars, that doesn’t mean his campaign to return to the White House is over.
He wouldn’t even be the first candidate to run for that office while incarcerated. That piece of history is part of it Eugene V. Debswho ran for the Socialist Party in 1920 – and received almost a million votes, or about 3 percent.
The circumstances are of course different. Debs, despite his influence and fame, was essentially a fringe candidate that year; Trump has already held office and is the almost certain nominee for one of the country’s two major political parties. But there are also similarities.
WHO WAS DEBS?
Born in 1855, Debs became a powerful voice advocating for labor issues from his youth. A loyal union member and leader, he was first sent to prison for six months after the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894 for violating a federal injunction against the strike.
He became a committed socialist and a founder of the Socialist Party of America. As a socialist, he ran for president in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912.
However, in 1918 he was sent to prison for speaking out against American involvement in World War I, in violation of the recently passed Sedition Act. But incarceration in a federal prison in Atlanta did not lower Debs’ profile at all, and in 1920 he was again nominated as the party’s presidential candidate.
How did he handle running while in prison?
The fact that he was in prison did not make campaigning impossible either. Although Debs obviously couldn’t travel around the country himself, his party turned his status into a rallying point by using his convict number on campaign buttons. Surrogates spoke for him, as did a video telling him about his nomination that was played across the country, said Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University.
“Debs’ fame and the novelty of him running for president from prison gave him something of a purchase,” Doherty said. “It was a credible campaign, considering you’re escaping from prison.”
