Why Does the American Press say that Nobody Ever Ran for President from Jail

Question

When Eugene Debs did it in 1920?

https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2023/april/eugene-debs-tom-doherty.html

I hear this lie repeated all the time on the US press. How come?

Answer 1

I think they are referring to major party candidates.

Comments

Are you sure? Is "from a major political party" the qualifying statement? I'm not sure.

Answer 2

I don’t know, but Lyndon LaRouche a far right candidate did exactly that in 1992. Although he originally started out on the far left (Marxist )He ran a total of 8 times!

I had never heard that said. Can you tell me your source?

Comments

CNN and MSNBC have both said that nobody has ever run for President while in jail. I have heard it repeated several times. Each time I hear it I croak. Its a lie.

However I looked it up and couldn't find proof and checked out youtube. The closest I came was this, answering the question. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-indictment-could-run-for-president-2-others-did-2023-3

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Wow! Even tho I channel surf a lot to get different takes on prevalent opinions, I hadn’t heard that one!

What I did hear was no past President had been convicted of Espionage before.

Interesting. Thx for the update!

Answer 3

• The Constitution doesn't stop candidates from running for president while serving jail time.
• Two previous candidates, Eugene V. Debs in 1920, and Lyndon LaRouche in 1992, both ran from prison.
• If Trump is convicted, it's possible he could run for president from behind bars.

Eugene V. Debs was in an Atlanta penitentiary, serving a ten-year sentence, when he lost the 1920 presidential election. Two years earlier, Debs, a labor leader, had spoken out against America’s involvement in World War I. He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, after the prosecution argued that his antiwar speech obstructed military enrollment. The 1920 loss didn’t come as a surprise to Debs, who had run four times before. His fifth and final run, promoted with a campaign button that read “For President Convict No. 9653,” brought him nearly one million votes, says Claire Jerry, curator of political history at the National Museum of American History . President Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine