Coins & Elections
Welcome to The Liberty Cap Foundation’s new series on coins and elections
Over the next few weeks, we will explore the use and language of coins in elections and electioneering. Please contact us at Hello@thelibertycapfoundation.org if you have any burning coin and election questions you’d like us to explore.
People waiting in line to vote.
Second in Our Series on Coins & Elections
Election Swag Then & Now
For our second post, we decided we’d look at how campaign swag connects people to campaigns and the positions of candidates. While maybe the most responsible way to connect candidates to voters would be by providing policy details and platforms, maybe the most realistic answer is the power of images, swag, and slogans produced aplenty in presidential elections.
In 2024, Presidential election campaign swag is everywhere. MAGA hats abound, “,la” yard signs pepper neighborhoods, and cat lady t-shirts stalk crowds. In our visual culture, we are adept at reading images, and graphic designers know this, exploiting our associations with color and cutting away all but essential language from the swag. (Most signs have fewer than five words, including the candidate and, sometimes, a short slogan.)
Take a look at the famous Shephard Fairey image of Obama, for instance:
Shephard Fairey Obama poster, 2008
The pose is thoughtful. His eyes look forward, and the graphic visual stylizes him, evoking Andy Warhol images of iconic Americans (pictured below, Warhol’s print of Jackie Kennedy, 1964). Linking a candidate to a series of already known images places them in a nexus of association, and the single word, “hope” anchors the pose into a concrete action.
Andy Warhol Jackie Kennedy print, 1964
Likewise, for Trump, the MAGA hat invokes the all-American appeal of trucker hats and triggers emotional connection to America. The red and white color scheme is high contrast, a phrase that could as easily refer to Trump’s approach to electioneering as to the slogan, “Make America Great Again,” a stark rejection of assumptions of American greatness.
2024 MAGA hat
But how did campaigns “get out the vote” before our highly image-saturated time? It is not until 1896 that celluloid is first used in campaign buttons, forever changing the look of presidential elections. Part of the answer is presidential tokens (which look a lot like coins). In 1860, on the threshold of the Civil War, Lincoln’s presidential token looked like this:
Lincoln 1860 campaign token
The reverse of the coin shows an American Eagle with “arrows in one talon and an olive branch in another.” For people in 1860 who might be holding this token in their hand, they would look at this coin and see an upside down version of the 1859 Indian head penny, on whose reverse was a wreath with three arrows, and the obverse of this token echoed the 1858 and earlier cent design of a flying eagle:
1859 Shield Reverse
Lincoln’s token flips the wreath upside down, emptying it of the possibility of triumph (this is what the laurel symbolizes) until there is no slavery. The tactic of inversion and connection that we see in contemporary election posters also features on the tokens, but unlike 2024 election swag, though, the token presents a fairly complex message, playing on the association of the token size with the size of a cent, and with the moral and literal cost of slavery. Our swag tends to command us: hope, make. Their swag gave them more complex ideas to consider as the tokens jangled in the pockets of the electorate. With each sale in which the token was mistaken for a cent, or with each encounter where someone gave someone else the token, the message moved across populations, and the tactile nature of the token would allow people to pull out the coin and think about the slogan and the cost of slavery, in all ways.
Sometimes, the tokens are crowded with language. In 1876, the anti-Tilden sentiment was strong, as we see in this token:
1876 Anti-Tilden campaign token
Unlike the stark, 21st century graphics of either Obama or Trump, this token uses slogans and images and medical language –Tildenopathy–to satirically mourn the Democratic party. In case any of that is too subtle, the token’s reverse deliberately reads as an epitaph.
Maybe part of the difference between then and now, between the verbal and the visual, besides, of course, differences in technology, came from what was expected in a presidential campaign. Unlike now, when our candidates met once, for 90 minutes, in the 19th century, candidates might meet at state fairs and debate for hours, as happened in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. These debates lasted hours (usually a minimum of three hours)–sometimes taking a dinner break and then reconvening. And the audience was not policy wonks but everyone, from farmers to townspeople, all interested in seeing what the candidates had to say. Within this framework of interest in language and debate and national politics, the token becomes a reminder of what is at stake and what was said. As people would tell others of what they saw at the fair and read about it in newspapers, so they would hand the tokens to others, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes directly to persuade. Take a look at this site for more campaign tokens from the 1860-1864 elections.
We live in a vastly different world, but one that still uses tokens, if for different reasons. Think of the power of the tokens for sobriety, handed out at Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, or challenge coins.
So what’s happened to presidential tokens? In the 21st century, they have morphed into something much more like a coin. Because these designs are so much like a coin, they invoke legitimacy for the candidate. Consider the White House’s online shop. A few months ago, the coin below was being sold as reminder of who would be in the election. Take a close look at the text below the coins:
2024 White House Shop Election Coin
Unlike the 19th c. presidential tokens, this coin is fairly neutral, balancing the election on one side with the candidates on the other. The White House shop sells it as part of what they call “great moments in history through coins.” However, there’s one glaring problem: Joe Biden is no longer running.
Now, the White House’s shop reframes the coin as “The Presidential Debate that Changed History,” noting its “historical [s]ignificance: The 2024 Presidential debate, watched by 51 million viewers, was a defining moment in American politics. Biden’s struggle during the debate, coupled with mounting pressure from within his party and unfavorable polling data, led to his historic decision to withdraw from the race. This unprecedented move not only altered the course of the election but also underscored the vitality of democratic processes and the importance of leadership that resonates with the public.”
Unlike the excoriating 19th century tokens, this one is expressly bi-partisan, featuring the election on one side and both candidates on the other side, and unlike the tokens, these are sold as part of an ongoing marketing campaign about American history.
Then there are the coins produced by the Trump campaign, but at the prices these sell for, they will hardly find their way into pocket change.
2024 Trump silver coin
If you go to the Trump website, you’ll see that these “commemorative medallions” have been slabbed and certified by PCGS, suggesting authenticity and importance. They are collectors items, rather than tokens that would circulate through a population, and these are being sold by the Trump campaign itself. As one newspaper notes, unlike coins, whose value traditionally amounted to the amount of metal itself, the silver used in this coin is worth about $30, though the coin sells for $145.47.
Compared to the 19th century presidential tokens, the Trump medallion and the White House coin make no claims. They simply assert a (changed) historical moment or a candidate’s legitimacy, cloaking it in colored enamel or in PCGS slabbing, and selling it to people with money to spare. Challenge coins or presidential tokens are provocations–to behave in a particular way, to consider a key question. What happens when we lose those provocations and simply affirm an individual?
First in Our Series on Coins & Elections
Elections, the Coin Toss, and Roman Gods:
What Do Roman Gods, Coin Tosses and the US Elections Have in Common?
The Roman goddess Fortuna
When US children learn about voting and elections they celebrate the election process itself, including how to inform themselves about issues, how to set themselves up to vote, as well as the act of voting itself. These lessons enshrine at an early age the principle that each eligible voter’s vote matters. So, while the 2024 election’s closeness elicits nervousness–“tight race,” “decided by a few districts,” “swing states”--what we learned as children still holds: people will decide the race, even if, ultimately, the popular vote is interpreted by the Electoral College (itself composed of people). The election is not decided by chance. It’s decided by people who cast votes.
But there’s another, apparently less Democratic key phrase that we hear about the 2024 US Presidential election: “It’s a coin toss,” pundits say. On the surface, this seems to mean that the election is up in the air: it seems to capture the moment the coin flips in the air, where it could as easily fall heads or tails, Harris or Trump (another version of the same phrase is a “it’s a toss up,” which the Oxford English Dictionary links to coin tosses). But “it’s a coin toss” is more than a rhetorical phrase. In some ties, US elections are actually decided by coin tosses (more on this later). How, then, do we reconcile the chance in a coin toss with voting, an intentional act?
Probability of coin toss--but note that this isn't always the case.
One answer is to reframe the chance of the coin toss as an opportunity to discuss probability. This is the move made by the US Mint on the kids’ section of its website. In “Flipping Out for Coins,” after a brief history of the coin toss–material that is either repurposed from other websites or that other websites repurpose–the Mint moves into discussions of probability. The implication here is that the coin toss, which signals and is used for its randomness–can, in fact, be plotted using probability.
Yet people use coin tosses so that there is no bias, no stacking of the deck: which Wright Brother would first fly the Kitty Hawk is a much loved internet example of a coin toss. What is good for aviation, however, is not seen as good for elections. People view the coin toss as undemocratic, as invalidating the choice of people. Press coverage plays up the arcane and ridiculous nature of the procedure: “When a State Election Can Be Literally Determined by a Coin Toss . . . or drawing straws, or casting lots, or five-card stud—though thankfully not a duel.” In this article, Henry Grabar lists the many ways tied elections can be decided–including coin toss.
Given the sentiment that a coin toss is an undemocratic way to settle an election–given the 50/50 chance of how a coin might fall–calling an election a “coin toss” becomes, in a close election, an exhortation to action, to register to vote and to follow through on voting itself. The Atlantic article above ends with a call to action from Joanne Ferray (who goes on to lose the election), who hopes she never has to call heads or tails, “‘I hope it [the election] can be decided by the voters,’ she said, referring to next month’s recount. ‘With so much effort by so many people, it just seems sad that a coin toss can determine who goes to represent the district.’” For those of us who love to know the end of the story, the votes are recounted and Ferray, the upstart, loses with 6,259 votes to the incumbent McMillan’s 6,267 votes. There was no need for a coin toss.
Ferrary’s comments illustrate the different framing devices we use when we deal with outcomes. In elections, we need and want the systems to work. We value “transparency,” and so chafe under the possibility of the public’s will not being done. This extends to the electoral college or deciding tied elections.
The Romans had gods and goddesses, many repurposed from the Greeks (elsewhere on this site, you’ll find info about the Roman goddess, Libertas, who gave rise to our Liberty). For the Greeks, life was decided by the three fates, who could cut one’s life line when they chose. Theirs was a world where human planning did not often work. Our highly technological world tries to elide chance. We use algorithms to build predictive models. Some use predictive AI to write fluently and avoid grammatical mistakes. Ours is a world that does its best to remove chance, especially in something as important as an election.
For all that, though, we still live in a world with randomness and chance, and we are still subject to it.
Maybe someone knows they will be traveling during the election, so they request an absentee ballot, but it is held up on the road because of a random event (a road closure caused by a freak storm, or a mail truck that has broken down). Or perhaps a kid needs to be rushed to the ER and a parent misses voting at a precinct. Or maybe a work project with a tight deadline gets in the way of virtually everything, including voting. I’m not arguing for excuses here, but I am arguing for us to acknowledge chance and to see that chance does not invalidate intention. Instead, it is the background of intention.
In Ferray’s example, if nine more people had voted for her, she would have won. It’s this reality that drives the get out the vote movements we see in each election. Her race was ultimately decided by the people. For the ties that are decided by coin toss, though, we judge them harshly. We see it as random. Here, while the conversation normally turns to probability theory (as the US Mint does, above), I want to suggest that in part because we have the ability to measure very precisely (time, with nuclear clocks, area with what3words, and so on) what we particularly abhor is chance. The coin toss as representation of chance anchors us in an older world, and, maybe, in a more realistic world–one in which every outcome cannot be accurately predicted. This is not an either or discussion: it’s a both/and discussion. We should do all we can to register to vote and to exercise that vote. And we should recognize that sometimes chance is simply chance.
Lincoln penny on edge