Cleveland carried New York by less than a thousand votes, and with it the election. The margin was so slight that analysts could plausibly credit his defeat to any—or all—of several causes. It could have been Conkling, who refused to campaign for Blaine, saying that although he was a lawyer, he did not “engage in criminal practice.” Oneida County, the core of Conkling’s constituency, had a two-thousand-vote Republican majority in 1880. In 1884, it went for Cleveland. But it could have been Pulitzer’s cartoons or the Republican alienation of New York Catholics. The Democrats controlled the
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