NEW YORK (AP) — After his unprecedented felony conviction, former President and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump must wait to see what his sentence will be. But even if he has to spend time behind bars, that doesn’t mean his campaign to return to the White House is over.
He would not even be the first candidate to run for office from prison. This piece of history belongs to Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the Socialist Party in 1920 – and received almost a million votes, or about three percent.
The circumstances are obviously different. Debs was practically a fringe candidate that year, despite his influence and fame; Trump was already in office and was running as a near-certain nominee of one of the country’s two major political parties. But there are similarities, too.
WHO WAS DEBS?
Debs, born in 1855, was an energetic advocate for workers’ interests from a juvenile age. A staunch union member and leader, he was first imprisoned for six months after the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894 for violating a federal order against the strike.
He became a staunch socialist and a founding member of the Socialist Party of America. As a socialist, he ran for president in 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912.
In 1918, however, he was imprisoned for speaking out against American involvement in World War I, a violation of the recently passed Sedition Act. But his imprisonment in a federal prison in Atlanta did not diminish Debs’s fame, and in 1920 he was again nominated as the party’s presidential candidate.
HOW CAN HE DEAL WITH RACING IN PRISON?
Even being in prison didn’t make campaigning impossible. Although Debs obviously couldn’t travel around the country, his party made his status a rallying point, using his prison number on campaign buttons. Surrogates spoke for him, and a film clip of him learning of his nomination was shown across the country, said Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University.
“Debs’ fame and the fact that he’s running for president from prison gave him a certain strength,” Doherty said. “It was a credible campaign considering you’re running from prison.”
