Before Donald Trump overwhelmed the Republican presidential field, the business mogul believed that the nation’s economy ran better when Democrats were in control. He spoke favorably of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate in 2007. Changing course on specific issues is not uncommon among White House hopefuls. Abandoning one party upon seeing a chance to win the presidency through the other is less common, but not without precedent.

Case in point: 1872, when the Democratic Party took onetime abolitionist mouthpiece Horace Greeley for its standard-bearer. In the wake of the Civil War, Democrats were regrouping, regaining control of state and local governments and waxing enthusiastic about their White House prospects. What they got instead was arguably the worst major party presidential candidate in history.

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Greeley, editor of The New-York Tribune, helped found the Republican Party in the mid-1850s and supported Abraham Lincoln in 1860. During the Civil War, he was critical of Lincoln’s slowness to embrace emancipation. In 1868, he enthusiastically endorsed Ulysses S. Grant for president. That such a man should end up the face of the Democratic Party might have surprised Democrats in 1872, but it could be eerily familiar for conservatives today wondering how their party ended up with a nominee who had previously expressed support for abortion rights, some gun control measures and single-payer health care.

Greeley’s Democratic candidacy actually began with a splinter group of high-level Republicans unhappy with Grant’s unsteady leadership and corrupt Cabinet. This Liberal Republican group was a loose gathering of strange bedfellows whose opinions ranged from strident support to heated opposition on virtually all issues, notably free trade and enforcement of black civil rights. After six rounds of balloting at their Cincinnati convention that May, Greeley (who hadn’t been expected to carry his own state) won with 482 votes; Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts (a minister to Britain during the war and the son and grandson of U.S. presidents) was a distant second with 187.