1888 Pretty obvious fraud committed by the Republicans in New York, which was much remarked on at the time.
IMO Harrison carried New York fair and square in 1888. To quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
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There were accusations that Governor David Hill had "knifed" Cleveland, but
these seem to be rejected by most historians. (After all, if Hill wanted the
presidency in 1892, he should have wanted Cleveland re-elected in 1888, since
in that event the no-third-term tradition would eliminate Cleveland as a
candidate in 1892.) The real reason for the discrepancy between Cleveland's
vote and Hill's has to do with the liquor issue. Hill had vetoed the "high
license" bill (a bill to place a high fee on licenses that liquor merchants
acquired from the state of New York) and the Reublican candidate for
governor, Warner Miller, had criticized Hill for the veto.
http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=May&Date=19
The result is that Miller lost a substantial number of normally Republican
German voters. (Of course Miller had a dilemma: had he not criticized Hill
for the veto, Miller might have lost some votes to the Prohibition Party.)
Cleveland's biographer Robert McNutt McElroy quotes the anti-Hill editor of
the *Brooklyn Eagle,* St. Clair McElway as having acknowledged in 1907,
"Governor Hill was true to Mr. Cleveland in 1888. Mr. Cleveland lost this
state then because many German Republicans, who voted for General Harrison
also voted for Governor Hill...on account of the rigorous excise views which
Warner Miller had expressed. [This fact] made the vote for Hill larger than
for Cleveland, but Governor Hill, though he benefited by that fact, did not
promote it, and did all he could to get everybody who voted for him to vote
for Cleveland also."
All in all, I'd say that Cleveland's loss in New York in 1888 (narrowly, of
course; presidential elections in New York and indeed nationwide were almost
always close in the Gilded Age) was to be expected. After all, he had only
carried the state by 1,000 votes in 1884, and the Republicans had numerous
advantages in 1888 over 1884:
(1) A candidate (Harrison) who was less vulnerable to attacks on his personal
integrity than Blaine;
(2) The death of Roscoe Conkling, whose hatred of Blaine may have been as
responsible as anything for Cleveland's carrying New York in 1884 (Conkling's
stronghold, Oneida County, went for Cleveland by nineteen votes in 1884 after
having gone for Garfield by more than two thousand in 1880);
(3) No "rum, Romanism, and rebellion" embarrassment;
(4) Cleveland's stance in favor of lower tariffs, specifically his stance in
favor of placing wool on the free list. As James Ford Rhodes observed, "[H]is
recommendation of free wool made of every farmer who owned a sheep a
protectionist....it
is not unlikely that the advocacy of free wool was the
predominant factor [in Cleveland's defeat]. New York farmers owned one and
a half million of sheep and produced annually six million seven hundred thousand
pounds of wool. Indiana had over a million sheep producing five million pounds.
The Oregon State election in June, an indication of November, gave a largely
increased Republican majority; and this was a clear protest against the
Democratic policy of free wool, the clip in that State being ten million pounds." http://books.google.com/books?id=51wAAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA502
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BTW, I am not terribly disturbed by the discrepancy between the electoral and popular vote in 1888 or 1876 because in each case the Democratic edge in the popular vote was largely the product of the disfranchisement of southern African Americans.