See if this sounds familiar: A candidate for president vows to protect American jobs from immigrants, wants to change the rules for citizenship and tags a rival with a snide nickname.

Donald Trump in 2016? Not quite. Try Millard Fillmore in 1856.

In politics, everything old is new again. That’s a recurring, if implicit theme at an exhibit of presidential campaign memorabilia now showing at the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

The idea of political memorabilia conjures images of straw hats, buttons and potholders, but in an earlier America, textiles were the preferred medium for trumpeting one’s loyalties.

“Presidential Campaigning Over the Decades” is devoted exclusively to flags and other cloth artifacts spanning elections from 1840 to 1912. The exhibit’s twin themes are how the textiles were used and what was going on in the campaigns.

There are frequent echoes of the hurly-burly we’re all now enduring.

In 1856, for example, Fillmore, a former president, was mounting a third-party bid with the Know-Nothings, who wanted to protect jobs from hordes of Irish and Germans and favored 21 years of residency as a qualification for citizenship.

They also believed only native-born men should hold public office.

“Americans must rule America!” screams a banner in the exhibit. “We can’t go Ten Cent Jimmy.” Jimmy was former Secretary of State James Buchanan, who had once suggested lowering the minimum wage to 10 cents a day. The back of the banner is more to the point: “James Buchanan is an unreliable man!”

That message was good for 21.6 percent of the popular vote and eight electoral votes, but Ten Cent Jimmy, a Democrat, carried the day.

Many of the 60 textiles on display are campaign flags, which are American flags, sullied to one degree or another by slogans and images of candidates. This was common in the mid-19th century, when there was no law or established etiquette on how the flag could be used.

Design was so free-form that the stars were arranged any number of ways and frequently didn’t match the number of states at the time.

One of the rarest items is a flag from the 1872 campaign of Horace Greeley, with the famed newspaper editor’s bearded, bespectacled head staring out from the faded cloth. Only two others are known to exist.

In the 1880s, Civil War veterans helped spread a new ethos of honoring the flag, and this led to a 1905 law that barred its use in advertising. President William Howard Taft followed up with a 1912 executive order fixing its dimensions and star pattern.

Well before this, campaign flags fell out of fashion and were replaced by kerchiefs, which were tied around partisans’ necks or waved energetically from balconies.

In several cases, there are matching pairs of flags or kerchiefs for rival candidates, including two that show portraits of Republican James Garfield and Democrat Winfield Hancock, each set against a blue firmament amid a constellation of stars. Garfield is “the people’s choice,” and Hancock is “our next president.”

Why would opposing campaigns create such similar propaganda? The answer may not be obvious, but it should be, in that it speaks fundamentally to how society works.

The textiles were not generated by the campaigns but were consumer goods, mass-produced to be used once, then discarded. They were made for rival candidates not to ensure political even-handedness, but simply because there was a buck to be made from both sides.

The exhibit is drawn from the collection of Mark and Rosalind Shenkman. Mark Shenkman is the founder of Shenkman Capital Management, and chair emeritus of the UConn Foundation’s Board of Directors. He also funded the Mark R. Shenkman Training Center for UConn’s intercollegiate athletic teams.

In connection with the exhibit, the Benton plans a lecture on the collection by Jeff Bridgman, a flag and textile expert, at 6 p.m. Oct. 6, and a one-man show by historian Ted Zalewski, who will portray Theodore Roosevelt, at 6 p.m. Oct. 14.

One item on display that causes double-takes is an 1888 kerchief emblazoned with “Tippecanoe and Morton Too.” That’s Republican Benjamin Harrison channeling his grandfather, President William Henry Harrison, whose slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Clintons and Bushes were hardly the first legacy candidates.

Harrison championed American industry against both free trade and immigration, an issue that became a mainstay of Republican campaigns until the time of Roosevelt. And of course, it’s back on the front burner this year.

Text accompanying a 1904 textile that shows Roosevelt and his running mate, Charles W. Fairbanks, could almost describe Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence:

“Fairbanks was, in some ways, as different from Roosevelt as one could possibly get. Reserved, soft-spoken, and a hardline conservative, the ... senator was nicknamed the ‘Indiana icicle.’ He was as good a balance as any, geographically, politically and personally, to the progressive and outspoken Rough Rider from New York.”

A few items that don’t relate to campaigns are among the most interesting. These include a large red kerchief that shows scenes from the end of the War of 1812 and the fall of Napoleon. Another honors Confederate President Jefferson Davis and rebel luminaries like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

There’s also a broadside of the Declaration of Independence printed in Massachusetts just days after it took effect.

Possibly strangest to modern sensibilities is a macabre 1901 kerchief that commemorates — and practically celebrates — three presidential assassinations. Reverent portraits of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley dominate, but their killers are also named and prominently depicted in the act of murder.

Tasteless? Maybe, but no more so than presidential politics, then and now.