A teeny, tiny campaign button is proving size doesn’t matter when it comes to fetching record-high prices for political memorabilia.

A one-and-a-quarter-inch button featuring the sepia-toned portraits of 1920 Democratic presidential candidate James Cox and his running mate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, garnered a record-breaking $185,850 — an unprecedented amount for a pinback button — at auction earlier this month.

“This is the real holy grail piece,” said Scott Mussell, an Americana specialist at Hake’s Auctions, which sold the campaign button.

Mussell explains that one of the reasons this particular button was so coveted was because only six of them in the same size exist. Not many of the Cox-Roosevelt buttons were produced, since “Democrats had no chance” to win the White House that year.

“Not a lot of material was made for them,” Mussell said. Doubters of Cox’s campaign proved to be right — he lost to his Republican opponent, Warren Harding, in a landslide.

In recent years, Mussell has seen an uptick of activity and interest in people getting involved in the world of political collections.

“I think the pandemic had a little bit to do with that,” the history guru said. “Everybody was stuck at home, and they’re looking around for stuff on the internet, and they’re digging through their attic and, you know, finding whatever relics they have.”

Older collectors are also starting to pass down some of their prized items to their kids, causing a “generational shift” and leading to more sought-after keepsakes making their way to auction houses.

Mussell said even in the digital age, political candidates will always produce physical items that could become collectibles.

“Even this last campaign — which was perhaps the most unusual of the many unusual campaigns recently — they still made stuff,” Mussell said.

“It seems like the Trump people didn’t make nearly as much as the Biden people. But going back to 2008 and 2012, the Obama campaign really, they made a lot of stuff: paper buttons, brochures, posters, all manners of things,” Mussell said.

For wannabe political collectors — or those eyeing big bucks down the road — Mussell suggests that hanging on to rare items is key. 

“More generic stuff is what sort of falls to the wayside as far as the values of these things are concerned.”

Folks in Iowa and New Hampshire likely have an advantage in the competitive collecting world because they can hunt down “early material,” said Mussell.

Even as campaigns focus their efforts on social media and clicks, Mussell predicted there will always be a place for political collectables.

“Ultimately, part of this is history. Part of it is nostalgia, as well.”

“People have nostalgia for whatever their upbringing was, so people who were part of that 2008 campaign, they’re going to have nostalgia for that going forward,” he said. “I think as long as that is kind of continuing, there’s always going to be interest in the material.”