Our seventh president skillfully bounced back from a bitter defeat. During his presidency, Donald Trump was frequently compared to Andrew Jackson. The seventh president, like the 45th, was an aggressive anti-establishment proto-populist. Quick to anger, Jackson rejected expert opinions and saw himself as the voice of the people. He waged sometimes one-man wars on the Bank of the United States and on the federal bureaucracy, which he saw as full of disloyal and self-interested officials. Trump himself clearly felt some kinship with his predecessor, stopping by Jackson's grave in Nashville on the 250th anniversary of his birth and hanging his portrait in the Oval Office.

Although much has been written about the two men's personalities and presidencies, little has been written about how they both took defeat. There are things that the GOP – if not Trump personally – can stand to learn from Jackson on the subject of losing.

The situation in 2022, for starters, is similar to that of 1826. Jackson was at the time still steaming over his loss in 1824's four-man race. In what he claimed was (in modern parlance) a stolen election, Jackson had come in first, with just over 40 percent of the vote but less than half of the Electoral College, meaning the race would go to the House of Representatives. While Jackson had finished about ten points ahead of runner-up John Quincy Adams, Adams became president owing to backdoor deals in the House. The most notorious of these was what Jacksonians termed a corrupt bargain between Adams and then–House speaker Henry Clay, in which the former would get the presidency and the latter the position of secretary of state, which was in those days tantamount to being elected the next president.

Although Adams won the day, he had done so with only just over 30 percent of the vote. He was deeply unpopular by 1826, but his defeat in 1828, with Jackson as his certain opponent, was no sure thing. By that point, only one president had lost reelection (his father, John Adams, in 1800). Plus Jackson had a famous temper, and voters in 1826 were still clearly uneasy with how his volatility might cause him to act if he became president. Essentially, Adams still had a chance to win a majority of the Electoral College next time.

So how did Jackson manage to turn things around? He and his aides did three things: They reinforced Jackson's image of respectability, worked to expand the coalition of his supporters, and made him into America's champion for democracy.

Jackson grasped that American voters appreciated his fight against what at that time was essentially a one-party establishment. But he and his aides also implicitly understood that Americans had happily voted for respectable candidates from that establishment before. Thus large portions of the Wyoming Letters, the campaign pamphlets and editorials penned anonymously by Tennessee senator John Henry Eaton, a Jackson admirer, were devoted to making the candidate seem more respectable. And when Jackson did appear in Washington after the election, during his brief second stint in the U.S. Senate, he made sure to be unfailingly well mannered.

This fed directly into the next change that Jackson made: coalition-building. More than the issue of temperament, the reason Jackson had failed to get a majority in 1824 was that it was a four-way race. Yet even so, Jackson was at just over 40 percent and in sight of a majority. He and his circle therefore began coalition-building: reaching out to groups and individuals, such as John Calhoun, who had not supported him in 1824.

Such coalition-building was especially necessary because of the explosion of voter participation that occurred in the 1820s. While the 1824 turnout of just over 25 percent of eligible voters was significantly higher than 1820's paltry 10 percent, the election of 1828 would ultimately see the largest expansion of voter-eligible participation in American history, with turnout jumping to over 55 percent. Jackson, mixing principle and self-interest, portrayed himself as the man for the moment, ardently supporting the expansion of the vote and demanding other democratic changes (including democratizing the Electoral College, which in some states was still selected by state legislatures).

Finally, in case these efforts did not seal the deal, Jackson and his circle named their nascent movement the Democracy – and later, simply the Democrats.

For today's GOP to retake the White House in 2024, the party will need to emphasize respectability, coalition building, and full-throated support for democracy. One need not agree with this in order to accept it.

Unfortunately, former president Donald Trump, who may very well be the front-runner for the nomination, has rejected all three. In attempts to deflect blame for the GOP's weak showing in the 2022 midterms, Trump went after Florida governor Ron DeSantis and, bizarrely, made a racist joke about Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's last name. These comments went down like a lead balloon among all but his most hardcore supporters and served as further evidence that Trump is never going to change. Republicans may have tolerated Trump's behavior the first time around because he fights, but a large portion of the electorate demands a modicum of respectability from leadership. If you want to win, you have to meet the voters at least halfway.

Trump has also shown no propensity for coalition-building post-2020. Indeed, it seems his obsessive focus on the conduct of the 2020 election has caused him to cut himself off from all but his most ultra-loyal supporters. This is politically reckless, as Trump's ceiling currently stands at around 46 percent (he won in 2016 with 46.1 percent of the vote and lost in 2020 with 46.8 percent).

Finally, Trump has allowed himself to be painted as an enemy of democracy. This is not entirely on him, as the media have worked for years to paint the GOP as anti-voting; the most prominent recent example is the media's treatment of Georgia, which was critiqued for its supposed voter-suppression law only to see record voter turnout in this year's elections. But Trump has not exactly made it difficult for them. His election denialism allowed the Democrats to make the 2022 midterms, in part, a referendum on defending democracy.

But Trump's failing to act on these things does not mean that the rest of the party must follow. Already, there are some Republicans who seem to be taking Jackson's path. Ron DeSantis, for example, expanded his coalition from 2018, when he won by a margin of less than one point, to 2022, when he won by 20 points, and his plans for policies such as cutting taxes on child-care products while taking a middle stand on abortion helps to both keep his current coalition and expand it further. Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Brian Kemp of Georgia likewise managed to stay in office by holding onto or expanding their coalitions, and their good governance led voters to trust that elections in their states would be legitimate (all three have also not really critiqued absentee voting but have instead supported voter ID laws, which are very popular). And while all are clearly fighters – DeSantis has famously gotten in many verbal scuffles with the press, and no one can seriously accuse any of them of being weak on conservative issues – they have managed to retain an air of respectability.

Andrew Jackson learned his lessons after 1824. As a result, he planned ahead and would go on to win the White House – twice. Even after leaving office, Jackson held more influence than arguably any retired president in American history, and he has continued to shape American politics until the present day. But had Jackson run the same type of campaign in 1828 as he had in 1824, he might very feasibly have thrown that all away and ended up giving the country a second term of the unpopular and uncharismatic John Quincy Adams.

He chose otherwise. Will the GOP?

Anthony Constantini is a Ph.D. student at the University of Vienna in Austria and served in 2016 as War Room director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.