that's the point it is the same as otl but Lincoln is a more able politician than Grant. So, this makes the 1876 election less contested and secures a precedent of souther subjugation as a matter of permanent policy instead of the whim of the radical wing of the Republican party.
What has 1876 got to do with it?
By that time, the Radicals had already lost power in all but two Southern States and in all the Border States. The two that remained in SC and LA were hanging on by their fingernails and plainly hadn't long to live. 1876/7 was just the moment when the Republicans accepted reality and stopped wasting effort in a failed cause.
Everyone rattles on about Lincoln being so much "cleverer" than Grant, but what can he actually
do (or be likely to do) that Grant didn't? He has at his disposal only the same (very limited) resources that Grant had.
Also, TTL he hasn't been assassinated, so he hasn't received the near-deification that his murder brought him OTL He'll already have lost some support by violating the two-term tradition, and with Reconstruction going much as OTL, and Northern voters getting fed up with it as OTL, how long before he slips back to the status of one more politician, who made a darned good war leader but who's not achieving half so much in peacetime?