Has a president ever won two non-consecutive White House elections?

Should Donald Trump win back the White House on Nov.5, he wouldn’t be the first former president to be elevated to a non-consecutive second term.That honor belongs to New Jersey’s own Grover Cleveland, the United States’ 22nd and 24th president.

Trump and Cleveland share some commonalities apart from running for the White House in three consecutive cycles.Both men have been plagued by allegations of sexual misconduct, up to and including rape.During the 1884 presidential campaign, Cleveland — then the Democratic governor of New York — was accused by a Buffalo garment industry supervisor named Maria Halpin of fathering her child a decade prior — and using his political influence to have Halpin placed in a psychiatric ward while the child was adopted by another family.“In an 1874 affidavit,” the Chicago Tribune wrote at the time, according to Smithsonian Magazine, “Halpin strongly implied that Cleveland’s entry into her room and the incident that transpired there was not consensual—he was forceful and violent, she alleged, and later promised to ruin her if she went to the authorities.”Cleveland’s campaign acknowledged that he and Halpin had been “illicitly acquainted,” but the governor left the paternity of Halpin’s child — given the name Oscar Folsom Cleveland — an open question, arguing that any of the prominent Buffalo businessmen in his circle (all of whom were married) could have sired the boy.

Halpin argued: “There is not and never was a doubt as to the paternity of our child, and the attempt of Grover Cleveland or his friends to couple the name of Oscar Folsom or any one else with that of the boy, for that purpose, is simply infamous and false.”However, Cleveland’s downplaying of the encounter as an unfortunate youthful liaison — despite him being in his mid-30s at the time — won the day, and he defeated Republican Sen.James Blaine of Maine in the November election, becoming the first Democrat to win the White Ho...