For all their noise and news dominance, presidential elections typically don’t change the country all that much. That isn’t a bad thing but a sign of how strong American democracy is. It rarely veers far from the center, where successful policy usually lies. But on rare occasions, deep historical currents and extraordinary political talents produce an entirely new order. It happened in the presidential elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932—and, quite probably, 2016.

Denied the presidency in 1824 by what he called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson swept to a landslide four years later. He was the first president from west of the Appalachians—indeed, the first from anywhere other than Virginia or Massachusetts. Born dirt-poor, Jackson was also the first president to rise to affluence solely by his own effort.

It soon became clear that the country had entered a new political era. “Jacksonian democracy” moved the locus of power sharply down the socioeconomic scale. Soon most states repealed property requirements for voting, a first step toward universal suffrage.

Jackson created the modern Democratic Party, and the intense opposition to his policies coalesced into the Whig Party, establishing the two-party norm that prevails to this day. No wonder the great 19th-century American historian George Bancroft considered Jackson the last of the Founding Fathers.

The next great shift came with Abraham Lincoln. By the 1850s, slavery had become the dominant issue in American politics. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an expressly antislavery party, grew rapidly as the Whigs collapsed. When Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won the presidency in 1860, the Union quickly came apart. South Carolina seceded barely a month after the election. Six more states were gone by Feb. 1, 1861, with a month still to go before Lincoln’s March 4 inauguration.