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1828 United States presidential election

The 1828 United States presidential election was the 11th quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Friday, October 31 to Tuesday, December 2, 1828. It featured a repetition of the 1824 election, as President John Quincy Adams of the National Republican Party faced Andrew Jackson of the Democratic Party. Both parties were new organizations, and this was the first presidential election their nominees contested. This election saw the second rematch in presidential history, something that would not occur again until 1840.

With the collapse of the Federalist Party, four members of the Democratic-Republican Party, including Jackson and Adams, had sought the presidency in the 1824 election. Jackson had won a plurality (but not majority) of both the electoral vote and popular vote in the 1824 election, but had lost the contingent election that was held in the House of Representatives. In the aftermath of the election, Jackson's supporters accused Adams and Henry Clay of having reached a "corrupt bargain" in which Clay helped Adams win the contingent election in return for the position of Secretary of State. After the 1824 election, Jackson's supporters immediately began plans for a campaign in 1828, and the Democratic-Republican Party fractured into the National Republican Party and the Democratic Party during Adams's presidency.

The 1828 campaign was marked by large amounts of "mudslinging", as both parties attacked the personal qualities of the opposing party's candidate. Jackson dominated in the South and the West, aided in part by the passage of the Tariff of 1828. With the ongoing expansion of the right to vote to most white men, the election marked a dramatic expansion of the electorate, with 9.5% of Americans casting a vote for president, compared with 3.4% in 1824. Several states transitioned to a popular vote for president, leaving South Carolina and Delaware as the only states in which the legislature chose presidential electors.

Jackson decisively won the election, carrying 55.5% of the popular vote and 178 electoral votes, to Adams' 83. The election marked the rise of Jacksonian Democracy and the transition from the First Party System to the Second Party System. Historians debate the significance of the election, with many arguing that it marked the beginning of modern American politics by removing key barriers to voter participation and establishing a stable two-party system. Jackson became the first president whose home state was neither Massachusetts nor Virginia, while Adams was the second to lose re-election, following his father John Adams.

Background
While Andrew Jackson won a plurality of electoral votes and the popular vote in the election of 1824, he lost to John Quincy Adams as the election was deferred to the House of Representatives (by the terms of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a presidential election in which no candidate wins a majority of the electoral vote is decided by a contingent election in the House of Representatives). Henry Clay, unsuccessful candidate and Speaker of the House at the time, despised Jackson, in part due to their fight for Western votes during the election, and he chose to support Adams, which led to Adams being elected president on the first ballot.

A few days after the election, Adams appointed Clay his Secretary of State, a position held by Adams and his three immediate predecessors prior to becoming president. Jackson and his followers promptly accused Clay and Adams of striking a "corrupt bargain," and continued to lambaste the president until the 1828 election.

In 1824, the national Democratic-Republican Party collapsed as national politics became increasingly polarized between supporters of Adams and supporters of Jackson. In a prelude to the presidential election, the Jacksonians bolstered their numbers in Congress in the 1826 congressional elections, with Jackson ally Andrew Stevenson chosen as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1827 over Adams ally Speaker, John W. Taylor.

Jacksonian Party nomination
In October 1825, the Tennessee legislature re-nominated Jackson for president. Congressional opponents of Adams, including former William H. Crawford supporter Martin Van Buren, rallied around Jackson's candidacy. Jackson's supporters called themselves Democrats, and would formally organize as the Democratic Party shortly after his election. In hopes of uniting those opposed to Adams, Jackson ran on a ticket with Calhoun. Calhoun would decline the invitation to join the Democratic Party, however, and instead formed the Nullifier Party after the election; the Nullifiers would remain largely aligned with the Democrats for the next few years, but ultimately broke with Jackson over the issue of states' rights during his first term. No congressional nominating caucus or national convention was held.

Adams' relationship with Vice President John C. Calhoun deteriorated, with Calhoun opposing Clay's appointment as Secretary of State due to his own presidential ambitions. In June 1826, Calhoun gave his support to Jackson for the 1828 election. Calhoun's stance on the removal of Native Americans was not accepted by the Georgian electors who instead voted for William Smith.

Van Buren, who supported Crawford during the 1824 election, supported Jackson during the 1828 election and aided in the selection of Calhoun as vice president in order to prevent DeWitt Clinton, his political enemy, from being selected. Clinton died on February 11, 1828. Van Buren arranged for incidents to divide Calhoun and Adams such as him abstaining from a vote on tariff legislation supported by Adams in order for Calhoun to break the tie by voting against it.

Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Examiner, was one of the leading supporters of Crawford during the 1824 election and Van Buren convinced him to support Jackson. Van Buren convinced him of an alliance "between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North".

Adams Party nomination
President Adams and his allies, including Secretary of State Clay and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, became known as the National Republicans or "Adams Party." The National Republicans were significantly less organized than the Democrats, and many party leaders did not embrace the new era of popular campaigning. Adams was re-nominated on the endorsement of state legislatures and partisan rallies. As with the Democrats, no nominating caucus or national convention was held. Adams chose Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush, a Pennsylvanian known for his protectionist views, as his running mate. Adams, who was personally popular in New England, hoped to assemble a coalition in which Clay attracted Western voters, Rush attracted voters in the middle states, and Webster won over former members of the Federalist Party.

Adams support in New York aligned with the Anti-Masonic Party and Thurlow Weed, his campaign manager in the state, was sympathetic to the anti-masonic movement.

Campaign
The campaign was marked by large amounts of nasty "mudslinging." Jackson's marriage, for example, came in for vicious attack. When Jackson married his wife Rachel in 1791, the couple believed that she was divorced, but the divorce was not yet finalized, so he had to remarry her once the legal papers were complete. In the Adams campaign managers' hands, this became a scandal. Charles Hammond, in his Cincinnati Gazette, asked: "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?"

Jackson's campaigners fired back by claiming that while serving as minister to Russia, Adams had procured a young girl to serve as a prostitute for Emperor Alexander I. They also stated that Adams had a billiard table in the White House and that he had charged the government for it. (In fact Adams while minister to Russia had employed a young girl as a maid to his wife; the girl had written a letter which had been intercepted by the Russian postal services. Alexander I had been curious to meet the letter writer publicly at court and Adams had done so. The billiard table was Adams' personal property; a bill for repairing it had been accidentally included in the White House expense accounts. Adams also came under attack for having a chess set). Jackson also came under heavy attack as a slave trader who bought and sold slaves and moved them about in defiance of modern standards of morality (he was not attacked for merely owning slaves used in plantation work). The Coffin Handbills attacked Jackson for his courts-martial, execution of deserters and massacres of Indian villages, and also his habit of dueling and that he supposedly fought over 100 duels. In fact Jackson had only fought three duels: in the first both men had fired at each other but made up; in the second duel, Jackson vs John Sevier, it had taken place but only two persons not connected with either party had been slightly injured. The third duel was with Charles Dickinson in which Dickinson was mortally wounded while Jackson was left with a bullet in his chest. A so-called fourth duel between Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton was in fact a frontier brawl which left Jackson badly wounded in the shoulder.

Ezra Stiles Ely attacked Adams' Unitarian beliefs and called for Christians to vote for Jackson.

Jackson avoided articulating issue positions, instead campaigning on his personal qualities and his opposition to Adams. Adams avoided popular campaigning, instead emphasizing his support of specific issues. Adams's praise of internal improvements in Europe, such as "lighthouses of the skies" (observatories), in his first annual message to Congress, and his suggestion that Congress not be "palsied by the will of our constituents" were given attention in and out of the press. John Randolph stated on the floor of the Senate that he "never will be palsied by any power save the constitution, and the will of my constituents." Jackson wrote that a lavish government combined with contempt of the constituents could lead to despotism, if not checked by the "voice of the people." Modern campaigning was also introduced by Jackson. People kissed babies, had picnics, and started many other traditions during the campaign.

Jefferson's opinion
Thomas Jefferson wrote favorably in response to Jackson in December 1823 and extended an invitation to his estate of Monticello: "I recall with pleasure the remembrance of our joint labors while in the Senate together in times of great trial and of hard battling, battles indeed of words, not of blood, as those you have since fought so much for your own glory & that of your country; with the assurance that my attempts continue undiminished, accept that of my great respect & consideration."

Jefferson wrote of the outcome of the contingent election of 1825 in a letter to William H. Crawford, who had been the nominee of the congressional caucus of Democratic-Republicans, saying that he had hoped to congratulate Crawford on his election to the presidency but "events had not been what we had wished."

In the next election, Jackson's and Adams's supporters saw value in establishing the opinion of Jefferson in regards to their respective candidates and against their opposition. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, on the same day as his predecessor, John Adams, Adam's father.

A goal of the pro-Adams was to depict Jackson as a "mere military chieftain." Edward Coles recounted that Jefferson told him in a conversation in August 1825 that he feared the popular enthusiasm for Jackson: "It has caused me to doubt more than anything that has occurred since our Revolution." Coles used the opinion of Thomas Gilmer to back himself up; Gilmer said Jefferson told him at Monticello before the election of Adams in 1825, "One might as well make a sailor of a cock, or a soldier of a goose, as a President of Andrew Jackson." Daniel Webster, who was also at Monticello at the time, made the same report. Webster recorded that Jefferson told him in December 1824 that Jackson was a dangerous man unfit for the presidency. Historian Sean Wilentz described Webster's account of the meeting as "not wholly reliable." Biographer Robert V. Remini said that Jefferson "had no great love for Jackson."

Gilmer accused Coles of misrepresentation, in Jefferson's opinion had changed, Gilmer said. Jefferson's son-in-law, former Virginia Governor Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., said in 1826 that Jefferson had a "strong repugnance" to Henry Clay. Randolph publicly stated that Jefferson became friendly to Jackson's candidacy as early as the summer of 1825, perhaps because of the "corrupt bargain" charge, and thought of Jackson as "an honest, sincere, clear-headed and strong-minded man; of the soundest political principles" and "the only hope left" to reverse the increasing powers assumed by the federal government. Others said the same thing, but Coles could not believe Jefferson's opinion had changed.

In 1827, Virginia Governor William B. Giles released a letter from Jefferson meant to be kept private to Thomas Ritchie's Richmond Enquirer. It was written after Adams's first annual message to Congress and it contained an attack from Jefferson on the incumbent administration. Giles said Jefferson's alarm was with the usurpation of the rights of the states, not with a "military chieftain." Jefferson wrote, "take together the decisions of the federal court, the doctrines of the President, and the misconstructions of the constitutional compact acted on by the legislature of the federal bench, and it is but too evident, that the three ruling branches of that department are in combination to strip their colleagues, the State authorities, of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise themselves all functions foreign and domestic." Of the Federalists, he continued, "But this opens with a vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who, having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of '76, now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and moneyed incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce, and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered plowman and beggared yeomanry." The Jacksonians and states' rights men heralded its publication; the Adams men felt it a symptom of senility. Giles omitted a prior letter of Jefferson's praise of Adams for his role in the embargo of 1808. Thomas Jefferson Randolph soon collected and published Jefferson's correspondence.

Results
All of the states, except for Delaware and South Carolina, selected their electors through a popular vote. The selection of electors began on October 31 with elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania and ended on November 13 with elections in North Carolina. The Electoral College met on December 3.

Adams won the same states that his father had won in the election of 1800 (the New England states, New Jersey, and Delaware) and Maryland, but Jackson won all other states and won the election in a landslide.

The Democratic Party in Georgia was hopelessly divided into two factions (Troup and Clark) at the time. Despite this, both factions nominated Jackson for President, with the election being primarily a test of the strength of these two factions - the Adams electors ran a very poor third, with just 3.21% of the vote. The winning slate, which received a 3,000 vote majority.

Jackson received 50.3% of the vote in states without slavery while he received 72.6% of the vote in states with slavery. He received 200,000 votes in the South and 400,000 votes in the North, but the Three-fifths Compromise, which inflated the South's electoral votes, resulted in him receiving 105 electoral votes from the South and 73 votes from the North.

This was the first election in American history in which the incumbent president lost re-election despite winning a greater share of the popular vote than in the previous election. This would not happen again until 2020. Adams' loss was also the second time an elected president lost the popular vote twice, this also occurred with Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and 1892, and Donald Trump who lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020.

This was the last election in which the Democrats won Kentucky until 1856. It is also the only election where Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont voted for the National Republicans, and the last time that New Hampshire voted against the Democrats until 1856.

It was also the only election in which an electoral vote split occurred in Maine until the election of 2016, the first election in which the winning ticket did not have a north–south balance, and the first election in which two northerners ran against two southerners.

Source (Popular Vote): Dubin, Michael J. United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860 Source (Electoral Vote):

(a) The popular vote figures exclude Delaware and South Carolina: both states' electors were chosen by the state legislatures rather than by a popular vote.

(b) ''The other vote was from Georgia where two slates pledged to Jackson, representing factions of the party, ran. The winning slate was Jackson with Smith - the Troup Faction - and the other was Jackson with Calhoun - the Clark faction. Many sources combine the vote when reporting the Georgia results, but this is legally incorrect.''

States that flipped from Democratic-Republican to National Republican

 * Connecticut
 * Delaware
 * Maine
 * Maryland
 * Massachusetts
 * New Hampshire
 * New Jersey
 * Rhode Island
 * Vermont

States that flipped from Democratic-Republican to Democratic

 * Alabama
 * Georgia
 * Illinois
 * Indiana
 * Kentucky
 * Louisiana
 * Mississippi
 * Missouri
 * New York
 * North Carolina
 * Ohio
 * Pennsylvania
 * South Carolina
 * Tennessee
 * Virginia

Close states
Districts where the margin of victory was under 1%:
 * 1)  NY-20 0.45%
 * 2)  MD-3 0.49%
 * 3)  MD-6 0.65%

States and Districts where the margin of victory was under 5%:
 * 1)  Maine-Cumberland 2.22%
 * 2)  NY-16 2.63%
 * 3)  MD-4 2.67%
 * 4)  NY-8 2.77%
 * 5)  Ohio 3.16%
 * 6)  NY-10 3.34%
 * 7)  NY-1 3.85%
 * 8)  New Jersey 4.02%
 * 9)  MD-7 4.04%
 * 10)  NY-13 4.19%
 * 11)  NY-9 4.34%

States and Districts where the margin of victory was under 10%:
 * 1)  NY-19 5.65%
 * 2)  NY-23 5.81%
 * 3)  Maine-Oxford 5.90%
 * 4)  Louisiana 6.07%
 * 5)  NY-14 6.22%
 * 6)  New Hampshire 6.48%
 * 7)  NY-4 9.15%
 * 8)  NY-22 9.20%
 * 9)  NY-17 9.51%
 * 10)  NY-28 9.77%

Aftermath
Rachel Jackson had been having chest pains throughout the campaign, and she was traumatized by the personal attacks on her marriage. She became ill and died on December 22, 1828. Jackson accused the Adams campaign, and Henry Clay even more so, of causing her death, saying, "I can and do forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy." Andrew Jackson was sworn in as president on March 4, 1829. After the inauguration, a mob entered the White House to shake the new president's hand, damaging the furniture and lights. Jackson escaped through the back, and large punch bowls were set up to lure the crowd outside. Conservatives were horrified at this event, and held it up as a portent of terrible things to come from the first Democratic president. When Jackson arrived in Washington, D.C., he was to pay the customary courtesy call on the outgoing president, but he refused to do so. John Quincy Adams responded by refusing to go to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, similar to his father who did not attend the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson 28 years before. While Jackson did not hold John Quincy Adams among those who had slandered Rachel Jackson, social relations between the two men were cold and impersonal: for example, when Adams heard from a third party that Jackson would invite him to a social dinner he responded that Jackson should send the invitation personally. In his diary Adams also revealed his disgust that not only was his alma mater Harvard College going to award Jackson an honorary Doctor of Law degree (Jackson had not gone to study law in college but had learned law as a law clerk to a judge) but that they were going to do so to a "barbarian" [i.e., someone who had not studied the classical languages of Latin and Greek].


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1832 United States presidential election

The 1832 United States presidential election was the 12th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, November 2 to Wednesday, December 5, 1832. Incumbent president Andrew Jackson, candidate of the Democratic Party, defeated Henry Clay, candidate of the National Republican Party.

The election saw the first use of the presidential nominating conventions, and the Democrats, National Republicans, and the Anti-Masonic Party all used conventions to select their candidates. Jackson won re-nomination with no opposition, and the 1832 Democratic National Convention replaced Vice President John C. Calhoun with Martin Van Buren. The National Republican Convention nominated a ticket led by Clay, a Kentuckian who had served as Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams. The Anti-Masonic Party, one of the first major U.S. third parties, nominated former Attorney General William Wirt.

Jackson faced heavy criticism for his actions in the Bank War, but remained popular among the general public. He won a majority of the popular vote and 219 of the 288 electoral votes, carrying most states outside New England. Clay won 37.4% of the popular vote and 49 electoral votes, while Wirt won 7.8% of the popular vote and carried the state of Vermont. Virginia Governor John Floyd, who had not actively campaigned, won South Carolina's electoral votes. After the election, members of the National Republican Party and the Anti-Masonic Party formed the Whig Party, which became the Democrats' primary opponent over the next two decades.

Nominations
With the demise of the congressional nominating caucus in the election of 1824, the political system was left without an institutional method on the national level for determining presidential nominations. For this reason, the candidates of 1832 were chosen by national conventions. The first national convention was held by the Anti-Masonic Party in Baltimore, Maryland, in September 1831. The National Republican Party and the Democratic Party soon imitated them, also holding conventions in Baltimore, which would remain a favored venue for national political conventions for decades.

Democratic Party
President Jackson and Vice President Calhoun had a strained relationship for a number of reasons, most notably a difference in opinion about the Nullification Crisis and the involvement of Calhoun's wife Floride in the Eaton affair. As a result, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren and Secretary of War John H. Eaton resigned from office in April 1831, and Jackson requested the resignation of all other cabinet officers except one. Van Buren instigated the procedure as a means of removing Calhoun supporters from the Cabinet. Calhoun further aggravated Jackson in the summer of 1831 when he issued his "Fort Hill Letter," in which he outlined the constitutional basis for a state's ability to nullify an act of Congress. The final blow to the Jackson-Calhoun relationship came when Jackson nominated Van Buren to serve as Minister to Great Britain and the vote in the Senate ended in a tie, which Calhoun broke by voting against confirmation on January 25, 1832.

In January it was not clear who the Democrats' candidates would be in the election later that year. Jackson had already been nominated by several state legislatures, following the pattern in 1824 and 1828, but he worried that the various state parties would not unite on a vice-presidential nominee. As a result, the Democratic Party followed the pattern of the opposition and called a national convention.

The 1832 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party's first, was held in the Athenaeum in Baltimore (the same venue as the two opposition parties) from May 21 to May 23, 1832. Several decisions were made at the convention. On the first day, a committee was appointed to provide a list of delegates from each state. This committee, later called the Credentials Committee, reported that all states were represented. Delegates were present from the District of Columbia, and on the first contested roll call vote in convention history, the convention voted 126–153 to deprive the District of Columbia of its voting rights in the convention. The Rules Committee gave a brief report that established several other customs. Each state was allotted as many votes as it had presidential electors; several states were overrepresented and many were underrepresented. Second, balloting was taken by states and not by individual delegates. Third, two-thirds of the delegates would have to support a candidate for nomination, a measure intended to reduce sectional strife. The fourth rule, which banned nomination speeches, was the only one the party quickly abandoned.

No roll call vote was taken to nominate Jackson for a second term. Instead, the convention passed a resolution stating that "we most cordially concur in the repeated nominations which he has received in various parts of the union." Martin Van Buren was nominated for vice president on the first ballot, receiving 208 votes to 49 for Philip P. Barbour and 26 for Richard Mentor Johnson. Afterward, the convention approved an address to the nation and adjourned.

Barbour Democrats
The Barbour Democratic National Convention was held in June 1832 in Staunton, Virginia. Jackson was nominated for president and Philip P. Barbour for vice president. Barbour withdrew, but the ticket appeared on the ballot in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia.

National Republican Party
Soon after the Anti-Masonic Party held its national convention, supporters of Henry Clay called a national convention of the National Republican Party. 18 of the 24 states sent delegations to the convention, which convened on December 12, 1831. The convention was attended by 168 delegates from eighteen states although one-fourth of the delegates were late due to winter weather.

On the convention's fourth day, the roll call ballot for president took place. The chairman of the convention called the name of each delegate, who gave his vote orally. Clay received 155 votes, with delegate Frederick H. Shuman of North Carolina abstaining because he believed that Clay could not win and should wait until 1836. As additional delegates arrived, they were allowed to cast their votes for Clay, and by the end of the convention he had 167 votes to one abstention. A similar procedure was used for the vice-presidential ballot. Former Congressman John Sergeant of Pennsylvania was nominated with 64 votes to six abstentions. A prominent Philadelphia attorney with connections to the Second Bank of the United States and a reputation as an opponent of slavery, Sergeant gave the ticket geographical balance.

Anti-Masonic Party

The first national nominating convention for a presidential candidate in American history was held by the Anti-Masonic Party in Baltimore, Maryland from September 26–28, 1831. The convention was attended by 116 delegates from thirteen states with Maryland being the furthest state in the South represented. The leaders of the party attempted to give the presidential nomination to Clay and Supreme Court Justice John McLean, but both declined.

Several prominent politicians were considered for the presidential nomination. Richard Rush would have been the nominee, but pointedly refused. As a result of this action, along with his softness toward Jackson, former President John Quincy Adams never forgave him. Adams was willing to run as the Anti-Masonic candidate, but the party leaders did not want to risk running someone so unpopular.

The delegates met behind closed doors for several days before the convention officially opened, making some initial decisions. Several unofficial presidential ballots and one official ballot were taken, in which William Wirt defeated Rush and John McLean for the nomination. Ironically, Wirt was a Mason and even defended the Order in a speech before the convention that nominated him. Wirt hoped for an endorsement from the National Republicans. When the National Republican Party nominated Henry Clay, Wirt's position became awkward. He did not withdraw, even though he had no chance of being elected.

The convention was organized on September 26 and heard reports of its committees on the 27th. The 28th was spent on the official roll call for president and vice president. During the balloting, each delegate's name was called, after which that delegate placed a written ballot in a special box. Wirt was nominated for president with 108 votes to one for Rush and two abstentions. Amos Ellmaker was nominated for vice president with 108 votes to one for John C. Spencer (chairman of the convention) and two abstentions.

Nullifier Party
While the South Carolina state legislature remained nominally under Democratic control, it refused to support Jackson's reelection due to the ongoing Nullification Crisis, and instead opted to back a ticket proposed by the Nullifier Party led by John C. Calhoun. The Nullifiers were made up of former members of the Democratic-Republican Party who had largely supported Jackson at the previous election, but were much stauncher proponents of states' rights, which ultimately led them to repudiate Jackson during his first term. Calhoun himself declined to head the ticket, instead nominating Governor of Virginia John Floyd, who also opposed Jackson's stance on states' rights. Merchant and economist Henry Lee was nominated as Floyd's running mate.

Ultimately, Floyd's candidacy amounted to little more than a protest against Jackson, as his ticket did not run in any state outside of South Carolina. He nonetheless received all the state's electoral votes.

Campaign
Jackson rode into office in 1828 on the strength of a coalition that included southern opponents of the Tariff of 1828, western advocates of internal improvements, many former Democratic-Republicans, and some former Federalists. Henry Clay predicted this unwieldy marriage of disparate and in many cases hostile interests would soon collapse under the pressures of office. Clay determined to split the Jacksonian party on the issue of the American System by engineering a confrontation over the Second Bank of the United States. He persuaded the president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, to request recharter a full four years early in order to coincide with the presidential election. As expected, Jackson vetoed the recharter bill and issued a stinging veto message criticizing the bank's interference in national politics. Clay predicted the president's hostility to the nationalist economic program would prove unpopular with voters, particularly in Pennsylvania where the bank was headquartered, and hand the Anti-Jacksonians victory at the polls.

Simultaneously, Jackson faced defections from the southern wing of his party over the Nullification Crisis. These southerners objected strongly to the tariff and argued for the right of the states to nullify unfriendly federal laws, a position Jackson refused to endorse. Clay hoped to bring the disgruntled ex-Jacksonians into the fold, but his tactic of promoting the American System as the major issue of the campaign was ill-designed for this purpose. While some Southerners did favor the bank, they were unwilling to break publicly with Jackson on this issue, and Vice President Calhoun was overtly hostile to the American System by 1832. In South Carolina, the faction loyal to Calhoun nominated a slate of independent electors who voted for Governor John Floyd of Virginia. Elsewhere, dissident Southern Jacksonians protested the nomination of Martin Van Buren by supporting Philip P. Barbour for vice president but were unwilling to break with Jackson himself. As the Barbour movement suggests, Jackson's personal popularity worked against the growth of opposition politics in the South despite the growing dissatisfaction with the national administration.

Meanwhile, Jackson's northern opponents were hurt by the divided state of the opposition. The failure of Anti-Jacksonians to unite behind a single candidate for president alarmed leaders like William Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed, who worked feverishly to avoid a disastrous split in the opposition vote. In New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Anti-Masons and National Republicans organized fusion tickets with electors pledged to support whichever candidate stood the best chance of defeating Jackson in the electoral college. Jackson carried all three states, however, along with their combined 93 electoral votes. His margin in Pennsylvania was much reduced from 1828, but still wider than the Democratic majority in the gubernatorial election held in October, due largely to the drop in support for the Anti-Masons. The Anti-Jacksonian "Union ticket" foreshadowed the merger of both parties with disaffected Southern Jacksonians in 1834 to form the Whig Party, which would constitute the major opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats for the remainder of the Second Party System.

While Clay hoped to alienate the different wings of the Democratic Party from each other by promoting the bank as an issue, his strategy backfired, as Jackson's veto message compellingly portrayed him as the defender of the common people against the furious assault of the financial interests. Events of the previous decade had not endeared the bank to working people, and they identified with Jackson's portrait of the "Monster Bank" as corrupt, self-interested, and destructive to democratic egalitarianism. Meanwhile, Clay's high-handed treatment of the Anti-Masons discouraged unity among Anti-Jacksonians, and the unpopularity of the National Republicans frustrated efforts to unite all opponents of the administration under a single roof.

Results
Jackson won the election in an electoral college landslide. Jackson received 219 electoral votes, defeating Clay (49), Floyd (11), and Wirt (7) by a large margin.

Jackson's popularity with the American public and the vitality of the political movement with which he was associated is confirmed by the fact that no president was again able to secure a majority of the popular vote in two consecutive elections until Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Only two other presidents from the Democratic party were ever able to replicate this feat: Franklin D. Roosevelt (for the first time in 1936) and Barack Obama (in 2012). Furthermore, no president succeeded in securing re-election again until Abraham Lincoln in 1864, and no Democrat would secure a second consecutive term until Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

As of 2023, Jackson was the second of seven presidential nominees to win a significant number of electoral votes in at least three elections, the others being Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. Of these, Jackson, Cleveland, and Roosevelt also won the popular vote in at least three elections.

Jackson was the second of only five presidents to win re-election with a smaller percentage of the popular vote than in prior elections, the other four are James Madison in 1812, Grover Cleveland in 1892, Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944 and Barack Obama in 2012.

Following the election and Clay's defeat, an Anti-Jackson coalition would be formed out of National Republicans, Anti-Masons, disaffected Jacksonians, and small remnants of the Federalist Party whose last political activity was with them a decade before. In the short term, it formed the Whig Party in a coalition against President Jackson and his reforms.

(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote. (b) ''66,706 Pennsylvanians voted for the Union slate, which represented both Clay and Wirt. These voters have been assigned to Wirt and not Clay.'' (c) All of John Floyd's electoral votes came from South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislatures rather than by popular vote. (d) Two electors from Maryland for Clay failed to cast votes.

Results by state
The 1832 presidential election results are displayed in the maps below.

States that flipped from National Republican to Democratic

 * Maine
 * New Hampshire
 * New Jersey

States that flipped from Democratic to National Republican

 * Kentucky

States that flipped from National Republican to Anti-Masonic

 * Vermont

States that flipped from Democratic to Nullifier

 * South Carolina

Close states
States where the margin of victory was under 1%:
 * 1)  New Jersey 0.76% (360 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 5%:
 * 1)  Delaware 1.98% (166 votes)
 * 2)  Maryland's 4th District 2.58% (325 votes)
 * 3)  Ohio 2.98% (4,707 votes)
 * 4)  New York 4.20% (13,601 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 10%:
 * 1)  Vermont 6.08% (5,236 votes)
 * 2)  Maryland's 2nd District 8.38% (777 votes)
 * 3)  Kentucky 8.98% (36,249 votes)

Tipping point states:
 * 1)  Maine 10.70% (6,647 votes)  (tipping point state for a Jackson victory)
 * 2)  Pennsylvania 15.90% (25,260 votes)  (tipping point state for a Clay victory)

Websites

 * source for "Electoral college selection"
 * source for "Electoral college selection"
 * source for "Electoral college selection"

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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1836 United States presidential election

The 1836 United States presidential election was the 13th quadrennial presidential election, held from Thursday, November 3 to Wednesday, December 7, 1836. In the third consecutive election victory for the Democratic Party, incumbent Vice President Martin Van Buren defeated four candidates fielded by the nascent Whig Party.

The 1835 Democratic National Convention chose a ticket of Van Buren (President Andrew Jackson's handpicked successor) and U.S. Representative Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. The Whig Party, which had only recently emerged and was primarily united by opposition to Jackson, was not yet sufficiently organized to agree on a single candidate. Hoping to compel a contingent election in the House of Representatives by denying the Democrats an electoral majority, the Whigs ran multiple candidates. Most Northern and border state Whigs supported the ticket led by former Senator William Henry Harrison of Ohio, while most Southern Whigs supported the ticket led by Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee. Two other Whigs, Daniel Webster and Willie Person Mangum, carried Massachusetts and South Carolina respectively on single-state tickets.

Despite facing multiple candidates, Van Buren won a majority of the electoral vote, and he won a majority of the popular vote in both the North and the South. Nonetheless, the Whig strategy came very close to success, as Van Buren won the decisive state of Pennsylvania by just over two points. As Virginia's electors voted for Van Buren but refused to vote for Johnson, Johnson fell one vote short of an electoral majority, compelling a contingent election for vice president. In that contingent election, the United States Senate elected Johnson over Harrison's running mate, Francis Granger.

Van Buren was the third incumbent vice president to win election as president, an event which would not happen again until 1988, when George H. W. Bush was elected president. He is also the most recent Democrat to be elected to succeed a two-term Democratic president. Harrison finished second in both the popular and electoral vote, and his strong performance helped him win the Whig nomination in the 1840 presidential election. The election of 1836 was crucial in developing the Second Party System and a stable two-party system more generally. By the end of the election, nearly every independent faction had been absorbed by either the Democrats or the Whigs.

Democratic Party nomination
The 1835 Democratic National Convention was held in Baltimore, Maryland, from 20 to 22 May 1835. The early date of the convention was selected by President Andrew Jackson to prevent the formation of opposition to Martin Van Buren. Twenty-two states and two territories were represented at the convention with Alabama, Illinois, and South Carolina being unrepresented. The delegate amount per state varied from Maryland having 188 delegates to cast its ten votes while Tennessee's fifteen votes were cast by one delegate.

The convention saw the first credentials dispute in American history with two rival delegations from Pennsylvania claiming the state's votes. The issue was solved by seating both delegations and having them share the state's votes. An attempt to remove the two-thirds requirement for the selection of a candidate was passed by a vote of 231 to 210, but was later restored through a voice vote.

Some Southerners opposed Johnson's nomination, due to his open relationship with an enslaved woman, whom he had regarded as his common-law wife. At the convention, Van Buren was nominated unanimously with all 265 delegates in favor, but the Virginia delegates supported Senator William Cabell Rives against Johnson. However, Rives got little support and Johnson was nominated with one more vote than the two-thirds requirement.

Whig Party nomination
The Whig Party emerged during the 1834 mid-term elections as the chief opposition to the Democratic Party. The party was formed from members of the National Republican Party, the Anti-Masonic Party, disaffected Jacksonians, and small remnants of the Federalist Party (people whose last political activity was with them a decade before). Some Southerners who were angered by Jackson's opposition to states' rights, including Sen. John C. Calhoun and the Nullifiers, also temporarily joined the Whig coalition.

Unlike the Democrats, the Whigs did not hold a national convention. Instead, state legislatures and state conventions nominated candidates, being the reason why so many candidates from the Whig party ran in the general election. Southern Nullifiers placed Tennessee Senator Hugh Lawson White into contention for the presidency in 1834 soon after his break with Jackson. White was a moderate on the states' rights issue, which made him acceptable in the South, but not in the North. The state legislatures of Alabama and Tennessee officially nominated White. The South Carolina state legislature nominated Senator Willie Person Mangum of North Carolina. By early 1835, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster was building support among Northern Whigs. Both Webster and White used Senate debates to establish their positions on the issues of the day, as newspapers carried the text of their speeches nationwide. The Pennsylvania legislature nominated popular former general William Henry Harrison, who had led American forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The Whigs hoped that Harrison's reputation as a military hero could win voter support. Harrison soon displaced Webster as the preferred candidate of Northern Whigs. State legislatures, particularly in larger states, also nominated various vice presidential candidates.

Despite multiple candidates, there was only one Whig ticket in each state. The Whigs ended up with two main tickets: William Henry Harrison for president and Francis Granger for vice president in the North and Kentucky, and Hugh Lawson White for president and John Tyler for vice president in the middle and lower South. In Massachusetts, the ticket was Daniel Webster for president and Granger for vice president. In South Carolina, the ticket was Mangum for president and Tyler for vice president. In Maryland, it was Harrison and Tyler. Of the four Whig presidential candidates, only Harrison was on the ballot in enough states for it to be mathematically possible for him to win a majority in the Electoral College, and even then, it would have required him to win Van Buren's home state of New York.

Anti-Masonic Party nomination
After the negative views of Freemasonry among a large segment of the public began to wane in the mid-1830s, the Anti-Masonic Party began to disintegrate. Some of its members began moving to the Whig Party, which had a broader issue base than the Anti-Masons. The Whigs were also regarded as a better alternative to the Democrats.

A state convention for the Anti-Masonic Party was held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from December 14 to 17, 1835, to choose presidential electors for the 1836 election. The convention unanimously nominated William Henry Harrison for president and Francis Granger for vice president. The Vermont state Anti-Masonic convention followed suit on February 24, 1836. Anti-Masonic leaders were unable to obtain assurance from Harrison that he was not a Mason, so they called a national convention. The second national Anti-Masonic nominating convention was held in Philadelphia on May 4, 1836. The meeting was divisive, but a majority of the delegates officially stated that the party was not sponsoring a national ticket for the presidential election of 1836 and proposed a meeting in 1837 to discuss the future of the party.

Nullifier Party nomination
The Nullifier Party had also begun to decline sharply since the previous election, after it became clear that the doctrine of nullification lacked sufficient support outside of the party's political base of South Carolina to ever make the Nullifiers more than a fringe party nationwide. Many party members began to drift towards the Democratic Party, but there was no question of the party endorsing Van Buren's bid for the presidency, as he and Calhoun were sworn enemies. Seeing little point in running their own ticket, Calhoun pushed the party into backing the White/Tyler ticket, as White had previously sided against Jackson during the Nullification Crisis.

Campaign

In the aftermath of the Nat Turner's Rebellion and other events, slavery emerged as an increasingly prominent political issue. Calhoun attacked Van Buren, saying that he could not be trusted to protect Southern interests and accusing the sitting Vice President of affiliating with abolitionists. Van Buren defeated Harrison by a margin of 51.4% to 48.6% in the North, and he defeated White by a similar margin of 50.7% to 49.3% in the South.

Disputes
A dispute similar to that of Indiana in 1817 and Missouri in 1821 arose during the counting of the electoral votes. Michigan only became a state on January 26, 1837, and had cast its electoral votes for president before that date. Anticipating a challenge to the results, Congress resolved on February 4, 1837, that during the counting four days later the final tally would be read twice, once with Michigan and once without Michigan. The counting proceeded in accordance with the resolution. The dispute had no bearing on the final result: either way, Van Buren was elected, and either way no candidate had a majority for vice-president.

Results
The Whigs' strategy narrowly failed to prevent Van Buren's victory in the Electoral College, though he earned a somewhat lower share of the popular vote and fewer electoral votes than Andrew Jackson had in either of the previous two elections.

The key state in this election was ultimately Pennsylvania, which Van Buren won from Harrison with a narrow majority of just 4,222 votes. Had Harrison won the state, Van Buren would have been left eight votes short of an Electoral College majority - despite receiving a majority (50.48%) in the popular vote - and the Whig goal to force the election into the House of Representatives (in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution) would have succeeded.

In a contingent election, the House would have been required to choose between Van Buren, Harrison, and White as the three candidates with the most electoral votes. Jacksonians controlled enough state delegations (14 out of 26) and enough Senate seats (31 out of 52) to win both the presidency and the vice-presidency in a contingent election.

This was the last election in which the Democrats won Connecticut, Rhode Island, and North Carolina until 1852. This was also the only election where South Carolina voted for the Whigs, and the last time it voted against the Democrats until 1868. It was also the last time that a Democrat was elected to the U.S. presidency succeeding a Democrat who had served two terms as U.S. president.

Source (Popular Vote): Source (Electoral Vote):

(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.

(b) Mangum received his electoral votes from South Carolina where the electors were chosen by the state legislatures rather than by popular vote.

Source:

Results by state
Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836-1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.

States that flipped from National Republican to Whig

 * Delaware
 * Kentucky
 * Maryland
 * Massachusetts

States that flipped from National Republican to Democratic

 * Connecticut
 * Rhode Island

States that flipped from Anti-Masonic to Whig

 * Vermont

States that flipped from Democratic to Whig

 * Georgia
 * Indiana
 * New Jersey
 * Ohio
 * Tennessee

States that flipped from Nullifer to Whig

 * South Carolina

Close states
States where the margin of victory was under 5%:
 * 1)  New Jersey 1.06% (545 votes)
 * 2)  Connecticut 1.3% (495 votes)
 * 3)  Pennsylvania 2.36% (4,222 votes)  (tipping point state for a Van Buren victory)
 * 4)  Mississippi 2.56% (515 votes)
 * 5)  Louisiana 3.48% (259 votes)
 * 6)  Georgia 3.6% (1,703 votes)
 * 7)  Ohio 4.31% (8,720 votes)
 * 8)  Rhode Island 4.48% (254 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 10%:
 * 1)  Kentucky 5.18% (3,632 votes)
 * 2)  North Carolina 6.2% (3,110 votes)
 * 3)  Delaware 6.54% (582 votes)
 * 4)  Maryland 7.46% (3,585 votes)
 * 5)  New York 9.26% (28,247 votes)  (tipping point state for a Harrison victory)
 * 6)  Illinois 9.38% (3,149 votes)

1837 Contingent election for Vice-President
In an unusual turn of events, Virginia's 23 electors, who were all pledged to Van Buren and his running mate Richard Mentor Johnson, became faithless electors due to dissension related to Johnson's interracial relationship with a slave and refused to vote for Johnson, instead casting their vice-presidential votes for former South Carolina senator William Smith.

This left Johnson one electoral vote short of an Electoral College majority. Since no vice presidential candidate received a majority of electoral votes, and for the only time in American history, the Senate decided a vice presidential race in a contingent election.

On February 8, 1837, Johnson was elected on the first ballot by a vote of 33 to 16; the vote proceeded largely along party lines, albeit with three Whigs voting for Johnson, one Democrat voting for Granger, and three abstentions (Hugh L. White declined to vote out of respect for his own running-mate, John Tyler, while the two Nullifier Party senators refused to back either candidate).


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1840 United States presidential election

The 1840 United States presidential election was the 14th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, October 30 to Wednesday, December 2, 1840. Economic recovery from the Panic of 1837 was incomplete, and Whig nominee William Henry Harrison defeated incumbent President Martin Van Buren of the Democratic Party. The election marked the first of two Whig victories in presidential elections, but was the only one where they won a majority of the popular vote. This was the third rematch in American history, which would not occur again until 1892.

In 1839, the Whigs held a national convention for the first time. The 1839 Whig National Convention saw 1836 nominee William Henry Harrison defeat former Secretary of State Henry Clay and General Winfield Scott. Van Buren faced little opposition at the 1840 Democratic National Convention, but controversial Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson was not re-nominated. The Democrats thus became the only major party since 1800 to fail to select a vice presidential nominee.

Referencing vice presidential nominee John Tyler and Harrison's participation in the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Whigs campaigned on the slogan of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." With Van Buren weakened by economic woes, Harrison won a popular majority and 234 of 294 electoral votes. Voter participation surged as white male suffrage became nearly universal, and a contemporary record of 42.4% of the voting age population voted for Harrison. Van Buren's loss made him the third president to lose re-election.

The Whigs did not enjoy the benefits of victory. The 67-year-old Harrison, the oldest U.S. president elected until Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, died a little more than a month after inauguration. Harrison was succeeded by John Tyler, who unexpectedly proved not to be a Whig. While Tyler had been a staunch supporter of Clay at the convention, he was a former Democrat, a passionate supporter of states' rights, and effectively an independent. As President, Tyler blocked the Whigs' legislative agenda and was expelled from the Whig Party, subsequently the second independent (after Washington) to serve as president. Van Buren would be the last incumbent president to lose his reelection bid in a general election until Grover Cleveland in 1888.

Whig Party nomination
The first national convention of the Whig Party was called for by members of the party in Congress and it was attended by almost 250 delegates in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Henry Clay, William Henry Harrison, and Winfield Scott ran for the party's presidential nomination. The delegations of each state balloted separately before meeting together with the other representatives of the states. Clay initially led on the first ballot, but Harrison won on the final ballot with 148 votes compared to Clay's 90 votes and Scott's 16 votes after supporters from Scott switched to Harrison. John Tyler was selected as a factional and geographical balance to Harrison.

Democratic Party nomination
Democratic members of the New Hampshire General Court made a call for the 1840 Democratic National Convention which was held in Baltimore, Maryland in May 1840. Delegates from twenty-two states attended the convention, but the sizes of the delegations varied with New Jersey having fifty-nine delegates to cast its eight votes while Massachusetts only had one delegate to cast its fourteen votes.

A committee was formed to make recommendations for the nominations and the committee supported Van Buren for renomination which was approved by acclamation. However, the vice-presidential nomination was left vacant due to opposition to Vice President Richard M. Johnson's personal life.

Anti-Masonic Party nomination
After the negative views of Freemasonry among a large segment of the public began to wane in the mid-1830s, the Anti-Masonic Party disintegrated. Many leaders began to move to the Whig party. Remaining leaders met in September 1837 in Washington, and agreed to maintain the party. The third Anti-Masonic Party National Convention was held in Philadelphia on November 13–14, 1838. By this time, the party had been almost entirely supplanted by the Whigs. The delegates unanimously voted to nominate William Henry Harrison for president (who the party had supported for president the previous election along with Francis Granger for vice president) and Daniel Webster for vice president. However, when the Whig National Convention nominated Harrison with John Tyler as his running mate, the Anti-Masonic Party did not make an alternate nomination and ceased to function and was fully absorbed into the Whigs by 1840.

Liberty Party nomination
James G. Birney, Myron Holley, Joshua Leavitt, and Gerrit Smith proposed the creation of an anti-slavery party. In July 1839, two resolutions proposed by Holley at the American Anti-Slavery Society's meeting in Cleveland, called for the creation of an abolitionist party. They failed. Nevertheless, the supporters nominated Birney and Francis Julius LeMoyne as a presidential ticket at a meeting in Warsaw, New York. However, Birney declined the presidential nomination as he preferred a nomination to be made by a regular body of abolitionists and LeyMoyne also declined the vice-presidential nomination. Smith and Holley made a call for an abolitionist nominating convention to be held on April 1, 1840, in Albany, New York. 121 delegates attended the delegation and selected a presidential ticket of Birney and Thomas Earle. which was accepted. It took the name Liberty Party.

Birney was unable to campaign during the election as he was in England until November. The Liberty Party received opposition from followers of William Lloyd Garrison and abolitionist Whigs. The Liberty Party received 7,453 votes.

Campaign
In the wake of the Panic of 1837, Van Buren was widely unpopular, and Harrison, following Andrew Jackson's strategy, ran as a war hero and man of the people while presenting Van Buren as a wealthy snob living in luxury at the public expense. Although Harrison was comfortably wealthy and well educated, his "log cabin" image caught fire, sweeping all sections of the country.

Harrison avoided campaigning on the issues, with his Whig Party attracting a broad coalition with few common ideals. The Whig strategy overall was to win the election by avoiding discussion of difficult national issues such as slavery or the national bank and concentrate instead on exploiting dissatisfaction over the failed policies of the Van Buren administration with colorful campaigning techniques.

Log cabin campaign of William Henry Harrison
Harrison was the first president to campaign actively for office. He did so with the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". Tippecanoe referred to Harrison's military victory over a group of Shawnee Native Americans at a river in Indiana called Tippecanoe in 1811. For their part, Democrats laughed at Harrison for being too old for the presidency, and referred to him as "Granny", hinting that he was senile. Said one Democratic newspaper: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and ... a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year ... and ... he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin."

Whigs took advantage of this quip and declared that Harrison was "the log cabin and hard cider candidate", a man of the common people from the rough-and-tumble West. They depicted Harrison's opponent, President Martin Van Buren, as a wealthy snob who was out of touch with the people. In fact, it was Harrison who came from a family of wealthy planters, while Van Buren's father was a tavernkeeper. Harrison however moved to the frontier and for years lived in a log cabin, while Van Buren had been a well-paid government official.

Nonetheless, the election was held in the wake of the Panic of 1837, one of the worst economic depressions in the nation's history, and voters blamed Van Buren, seeing him as unsympathetic to struggling citizens. Harrison campaigned vigorously and won.

Results
This was the first time that a majority of southern voters participated in the election, unlike in the north which has occurred in 1828.

Harrison won the support of western settlers and eastern bankers alike. The extent of Van Buren's unpopularity was evident in Harrison's victories in New York, the president's home state, and in Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson himself had come out of retirement to stump for his former vice-president.

Of the 1,179 counties/independent cities making returns, Harrison won in 699 (59.29%) while Van Buren carried 477 (40.46%). Three counties (0.25%) in the South split evenly between Harrison and Van Buren.

This was the first time a Democratic president lost re-election, as well as the first of only two times (the other being 1980) that a Democratic president lost re-election and lost the popular vote.

Harrison's victory won him precious little time as chief executive of the United States. After giving the longest inauguration speech in U.S. history (lasting about 1 hour and 45 minutes, in cold weather and rain), Harrison served only one month as president before dying of pneumonia on April 4, 1841. This was also the first election in U.S. history in which a candidate won more than a million popular votes.

This was the last election where Indiana voted for the Whigs. It was also the only election where the Whigs won Maine, Michigan, and Mississippi. The election was also the last time that Mississippi voted against the Democrats until 1872, the last in which Indiana did so until 1860, and the last in which Maine and Michigan did so until 1856. This is the only election in American history in which Alabama and Mississippi voted for different candidates.

The 1840 presidential election was the only U.S. presidential election in which four people who either had been or would become a U.S. President (Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, and Polk) received at least one vote in the Electoral College.

Source (Popular Vote): Source (Electoral Vote):

(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.

Results by state
Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836–1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–257.

States that flipped from Democratic to Whig

 * Connecticut
 * Louisiana
 * Maine
 * Michigan
 * Mississippi
 * New York
 * North Carolina
 * Pennsylvania
 * Rhode Island

States that flipped from Whig to Democratic

 * South Carolina

Close states
States where the margin of victory was under 1%:
 * 1)  Pennsylvania 0.12% (334 votes)
 * 2)  Maine 0.46% (422 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 5%:
 * 1)  Virginia 1.3% (1,120 votes)
 * 2)  Illinois 2.01% (1,867 votes)
 * 3)  New York 3.0% (13,268 votes)
 * 4)  New Jersey 3.59% (2,317 votes)  (tipping point state)
 * 5)  Michigan 4.14% (1,837 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 10%:
 * 1)  Mississippi 6.86% (2,505 votes)
 * 2)  Maryland 7.66% (4,776 votes)
 * 3)  Ohio 8.53% (23,375 votes)
 * 4)  Alabama 8.76% (5,481 votes)

Harrison
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too"

Van Buren
":: Rockabye, baby, Daddy's a Whig
 * When he comes home, hard cider he'll swig
 * When he has swug
 * He'll fall in a stu
 * And down will come Tyler and Tippecanoe.

 * Rockabye, baby, when you awake
 * You will discover Tip is a fake.
 * Far from the battle, war cry and drum
 * He sits in his cabin a'drinking bad rum.

 * Rockabye, baby, never you cry
 * You need not fear of Tip and his Ty.
 * What they would ruin, Van Buren will fix.
 * Van's a magician, they are but tricks."

In popular culture
In the 1997 film Amistad, Van Buren (played by Nigel Hawthorne) is seen campaigning for re-election. These scenes have been criticized for their historical inaccuracy.


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1844 United States presidential election

The 1844 United States presidential election was the 15th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, November 1 to Wednesday, December 4, 1844. Democrat James K. Polk narrowly defeated Whig Henry Clay in a close contest turning on the controversial issues of slavery and the annexation of the Republic of Texas. This is the only election in which both major party nominees served as Speaker of the House at one point, and the first in which neither candidate held elective office at the time.

President John Tyler's pursuit of Texas annexation divided both major parties. Annexation would geographically expand American slavery. It also risked war with Mexico while the United States engaged in sensitive possession and boundary negotiations with the Great Britain, which controlled Canada, over Oregon. Texas annexation thus posed both domestic and foreign policy risks. Both major parties had wings in the North and the South, but the possibility of the expansion of slavery threatened a sectional split in each party. Expelled by the Whig Party after vetoing key Whig legislation and lacking a firm political base, Tyler hoped to use the annexation of Texas to win the presidency as an independent or at least to have decisive, pro-Texas influence over the election.

The early leader for the Democratic nomination was former President Martin Van Buren, but his opposition to the annexation of Texas damaged his candidacy. Opposition from former President Andrew Jackson and most Southern delegations, plus a nomination rule change specifically aimed to block him, prevented Van Buren from winning the necessary two-thirds vote of delegates to the 1844 Democratic National Convention. The convention instead chose James K. Polk, former Governor of Tennessee and Speaker. He was the first successful dark horse for the presidency. Polk ran on a platform embracing popular commitment to expansion, often referred to as Manifest Destiny. Tyler dropped out of the race and endorsed Polk. The Whigs nominated Henry Clay, a famous, long-time party leader who was the early favorite but who conspicuously waffled on Texas annexation. Though a Southerner from Kentucky and a slave owner, Clay chose to focus on the risks of annexation while claiming not to oppose it personally. His awkward, repeated attempts to adjust and finesse his position on Texas confused and alienated voters, contrasting negatively with Polk's consistent clarity.

Polk successfully linked the dispute with Britain over Oregon with the Texas issue. The Democratic nominee thus united anti-slavery Northern expansionists, who demanded Oregon, with pro-slavery Southern expansionists who demanded Texas. In the national popular vote, Polk beat Clay by fewer than 40,000 votes, a margin of 1.4%. James G. Birney of the anti-slavery Liberty Party won 2.3% of the vote. As President, Polk completed American annexation of Texas, which was the proximate cause of the Mexican–American War.

Gag rule and Texas annexation controversies
Whigs and Democrats embarked upon their campaigns during the climax of the congressional gag rule controversies in 1844, which prompted Southern congressmen to suppress northern petitions to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Anti-annexation petitions to Congress sent from northern anti-slavery forces, including state legislatures, were similarly suppressed. Intra-party sectional compromises and maneuvering on slavery politics during these divisive debates placed significant strain on the northern and southern wings that comprised each political organization. The question as to whether the institution of slavery and its aristocratic principles of social authority were compatible with democratic republicanism was becoming "a permanent issue in national politics".

In 1836, a portion of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas declared its independence to form the Republic of Texas. Texans, mostly American immigrants from the Deep South, many of whom owned slaves, sought to bring their republic into the Union as a state. At first, the subject of annexing Texas to the United States was shunned by both major American political parties. Although they recognized Texas sovereignty, Presidents Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) and Martin Van Buren (1837–1841) declined to pursue annexation. The prospect of bringing another slave state into the Union was fraught with problems. Both major parties – the Democrats and Whigs – viewed Texas statehood as something "not worth a foreign war [with Mexico]" or the "sectional combat" that annexation would provoke in the United States.

Tyler–Texas treaty
The incumbent President John Tyler, formerly vice-president, had assumed the presidency upon the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841. Tyler, a Whig in name only, emerged as a states' rights advocate committed to slavery expansion in defiance of Whig principles. After he vetoed the Whig domestic legislative agenda, he was expelled from his own party on September 13, 1841. Politically isolated, but unencumbered by party restraints, Tyler aligned himself with a small faction of Texas annexationists in a bid for election to a full term in 1844.

Tyler became convinced that Great Britain was encouraging a Texas–Mexico rapprochement that might lead to slave emancipation in the Texas republic. Accordingly, he directed Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur of Virginia to initiate, then relentlessly pursue, secret annexation talks with Texas minister to the United States Isaac Van Zandt, beginning on October 16, 1843.

Tyler submitted his Texas-U.S. treaty for annexation to the U.S. Senate, delivered April 22, 1844, where a two-thirds majority was required for ratification. The newly appointed Secretary of State John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (assuming his post March 29, 1844) included a document known as the Packenham Letter with the Tyler bill that was calculated to inject a sense of crisis in Southern Democrats of the Deep South. In it, he characterized slavery as a social blessing and the acquisition of Texas as an emergency measure necessary to safeguard the "peculiar institution" in the United States. In doing so, Tyler and Calhoun sought to unite the South in a crusade that would present the North with an ultimatum: support Texas annexation or lose the South. Anti-slavery Whigs considered Texas annexation particularly egregious, since Mexico had outlawed slavery in Coahuila y Tejas in 1829, before Texas independence had been declared.

The 1844 presidential campaigns evolved within the context of this struggle over Texas annexation, which was tied to the question of slavery expansion and national security. All candidates in the 1844 presidential election had to declare a position on this explosive issue.

Democratic Party convention and campaign
Martin Van Buren, President of the United States between 1837 and 1841, and chief architect of Jacksonian democracy,  was the presumptive Democratic presidential contender in the spring of 1844. With Secretary of State John C. Calhoun withdrawing his bid for the presidency in January 1844, the campaign was expected to focus on domestic issues. All this changed with the Tyler treaty. Van Buren regarded the Tyler annexation measure as an attempt to sabotage his bid for the White House by exacerbating the already strained North-South Democratic alliance regarding slavery expansion. Calhoun's Packenham Letter would serve to spur Democrats of the South to the task of forcing the Northern wing of the party to submit to Texas annexation, despite the high risk of "aggressively injecting slavery into their political campaign over Texas."

The annexation of Texas was the chief political issue of the day. Van Buren, initially the leading candidate, opposed immediate annexation because it might lead to a sectional crisis over the status of slavery in the West and lead to war with Mexico. This position cost Van Buren the support of southern and expansionist Democrats; as a result, he failed to win the nomination. The delegates likewise could not settle on Lewis Cass, the former Secretary of War, whose credentials also included past service as a U.S. minister to France.

On the eighth ballot, the historian George Bancroft, a delegate from Massachusetts, proposed former House Speaker James K. Polk as a compromise candidate. Polk argued that Texas and Oregon had always belonged to the United States by right. He called for "the immediate re-annexation of Texas" and for the "re-occupation" of the disputed Oregon territory.

On the next roll call, the convention unanimously accepted Polk, who became the first dark horse, or little-known, presidential candidate. The delegates selected Senator Silas Wright of New York for Vice President, but Wright, an admirer of Van Buren, declined the nomination to become the first person to decline a vice presidential nomination. The Democrats then nominated George M. Dallas, a Pennsylvania lawyer.

Martin Van Buren's Hammett letter
Van Buren realized that accommodating slavery expansionists in the South would open the Northern Democrats to charges of appeasement to the Slave power from the strongly anti-annexation Northern Whigs and some Democrats. He crafted an emphatically anti-Texas position that temporized with expansionist southern Democrats, laying out a highly conditional scenario that delayed Texas annexation indefinitely. In the Hammett letter, published April 27, 1844 (penned April 20), he counseled his party to reject Texas under a Tyler administration. Furthermore, annexation of Texas as a territory would proceed, tentatively, under a Van Buren administration, only when the American public had been consulted on the matter and Mexico's cooperation had been pursued to avoid an unnecessary war. A military option might be advanced if a groundswell of popular support arose for Texas, certified with a congressional mandate. In these respects, Martin Van Buren differed from Henry Clay, who would never tolerate annexation without Mexico's assent.

With the publication of Clay's Raleigh Letter and Van Buren's Hammett letter, Van Burenite Democrats hoped that their candidate's posture on Texas would leave southern pro-annexationists with exactly one choice for president: Martin Van Buren. In this, they misjudged the political situation. Tyler and the southern pro-annexationists posed a potentially far greater threat than Clay, in that the Tyler-Calhoun treaty would put immense pressure on the northern Democrats to comply with southern Democrats' demands for Texas.

The Hammett letter utterly failed to reassure Middle and Deep South extremists who had responded favorably to Calhoun's Pakenham Letter. A minority of the southern Democrat leadership remained obdurate that Northern Democratic legislators would ignore their constituents' opposition to slavery expansion and unite in support of Texas annexation once exposed to sufficient southern pressure.

The extent to which Southern Democrat support for Martin Van Buren had eroded over the Texas annexation crisis became evident when Van Buren's southern counterpart in the rise of the Democratic Party, Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer, terminated their 20-year political alliance in favor of immediate annexation.

Andrew Jackson calls for annexation of Texas
Ex-President Andrew Jackson publicly announced his support for immediate Texas annexation in May 1844. Jackson had facilitated Tyler's Texas negotiations in February 1844 by reassuring Sam Houston, the President of Texas, that the U.S. Senate ratification was likely. As the Senate debated the Tyler treaty, Jackson declared that the popular support among Texans for annexation should be respected, and any delay would result in a British dominated Texas Republic that would promote slave emancipation and pose a foreign military threat to the southwest United States.

The former military hero went further, urging all Jacksonian Democrats to block Martin Van Buren from the party ticket and seek a Democratic presidential candidate fully committed to the immediate annexation of Texas. In doing so, Jackson abandoned the traditional Jeffersonian-Jacksonian formula that had required its Northern and Southern wings to compromise on constitutional slavery disputes.

The Texas issue was fracturing Van Buren's support among Democrats and would derail his candidacy.

Democratic Party campaign tactics
Historian Sean Wilentz describes some of the Democrat campaign tactics: "In the South, Democrats played racist politics and smeared Clay as a dark skin-loving abolitionist, while in the North, they defamed him as a debauched, dueling, gambling, womanizing, irreligious hypocrite whose reversal on the bank issue proved he had no principles. They also pitched their nominees to particular local followings, having Polk hint preposterously, in a letter to a Philadelphian, that he favored 'reasonable' tariff protection for domestic manufactures, while they attacked the pious humanitarian Frelinghuysen as an anti-Catholic bigot and crypto-nativist enemy of the separation of church and state. To ensure the success of their southern strategy, the Democrats also muffled John Tyler." Polk furthermore pledged to serve only one term as president. He would keep this promise, and would die less than three months after leaving office.

Senate vote on the Tyler-Texas treaty
The annexation treaty needed a two-thirds vote and was easily defeated in the Senate, largely along partisan lines, 16 to 35 – a two-thirds majority against passage – on June 8, 1844. Whigs voted 27–1 against the treaty: all northern Whig senators voted nay, and fourteen of fifteen southern Whig senators had joined them. Democrats voted for the treaty 15–8, with a slight majority of Northern Democrats opposing. Southern Democrats affirmed the treaty 10–1, with only one slave state senator, Thomas Hart Benton, voting against.

Three days later, Tyler and his supporters in Congress began exploring means to bypass the supermajority requirement for Senate treaty approval. Substituting the constitutional protocols for admitting regions of the United States into the Union as states, Tyler proposed that alternative, yet constitutional, means be used to bring the Republic of Texas – a foreign country – into the Union.

Tyler and Calhoun, formerly staunch supporters of minority safeguards based on the supermajority requirements for national legislation, now altered their position to facilitate passage of the Tyler treaty. Tyler's attempt to evade the Senate vote launched a spirited congressional debate.

Whig Party convention and campaign
Henry Clay of Kentucky, effectively the leader of the Whig Party since its inception in 1834, was selected as its nominee at the party's convention in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 1, 1844. Clay, a slaveholder, presided over a party in which its Southern wing was sufficiently committed to the national platform to put partisan loyalties above slavery expansionist proposals that might undermine its north–south alliance. Whigs felt confident that Clay could duplicate Harrison's landslide victory of 1840 against any opposition candidate.

Southern Whigs feared that the acquisition of the fertile lands in Texas would produce a huge market for slave labor, inflating the price of slaves and deflating land values in their home states. Northern Whigs feared that Texas statehood would initiate the opening of a vast "Empire for Slavery".

Two weeks before the Whig convention in Baltimore, in reaction to Calhoun's Packenham Letter, Clay issued a document known as the Raleigh Letter (issued April 17, 1844) that presented his views on Texas to his fellow southern Whigs. In it, he flatly denounced the Tyler annexation bill and predicted that its passage would provoke a war with Mexico, whose government had never recognized Texas independence. Clay underlined his position, warning that even with Mexico's consent, he would block annexation in the event that substantial sectional opposition existed anywhere in the United States.

The Whig party leadership was acutely aware that any proslavery legislation advanced by its southern wing would alienate its anti-slavery northern wing and cripple the party in the general election. In order to preserve their party, Whigs would need to stand squarely against acquiring a new slave state. As such, Whigs were content to restrict their 1844 campaign platform to less divisive issues such as internal improvements and national finance.

Whigs picked Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey – "the Christian Statesman" – as Clay's running mate. An advocate of the colonization of emancipated slaves, he was acceptable to southern Whigs as an opponent of the abolitionists. His pious reputation balanced Clay's image as a slave-holding, hard-drinking duelist. Their party slogan was "Hurray, Hurray, the Country's Risin' – Vote for Clay and Frelinghuysen!"

Henry Clay's Alabama letter
On July 27, 1844, Clay released a position statement, the so-called "Alabama Letter." In it, he counseled his Whig constituency to regard Texas annexation and statehood as merely a short phase in the decline of slavery in the United States, rather than a long term advance for the Slave Power. Clay qualified his stance on Texas annexation, declaring "no personal objection to the annexation" of the republic. He would move back to his original orientation in September 1844. Northern Whigs expressed outrage at any détente with the Slave Power and accused him of equivocating on Texas annexation.

Clay's central position, however, had not altered: no annexation without northern acquiescence. Clay's commitment brought Southern Whigs under extreme pressure in their home states and congressional districts, threatening to tarnish their credentials as supporters of slavery.

Whig Party campaign tactics
Historian Sean Wilentz describes some of the Whig campaign tactics: "'The Whigs countered Democratic attacks by revving up the Log Cabin electioneering machinery and redeploying it on behalf of the man they now celebrated as 'Ol'Coon' Clay. They also attacked former House Speaker Polk as nobody who deep down was a dangerous Loco Foco radical...With greater success, the Whigs linked up with resurgent nativist anti-Catholic movement strongest in New York and Pennsylvania, and planted stories that as president, Clay would tighten up immigration and naturalization laws. (Too late, Clay tried to distance himself from the nativists.)'

'The Liberty Party added to the confusion...Clay became the object of nasty abolitionist attacks. One notorious handbill, widely reprinted, by an abolitionist minister Abel Brown, denounced Clay as a 'Man Stealer, Slaveholder, and Murdurer,' and accused him of 'Selling Jesus Christ!' because he dealt in slaves. With the campaign to be decided at the electoral margins, Whig managers grew so concerned that, late in the campaign, they concocted a fraudulent letter that supposedly proved that James Birney was secretly working in league with the Democrats, and circulated it in New York and Ohio.'"

John Tyler
After the closed session Senate debates on the Tyler-Texas treaty were leaked to the public on April 27, 1844, President Tyler's only hope of success in influencing passage of his treaty was to intervene directly as a spoiler candidate in the 1844 election. His "Democratic-Republican Party", a recycling of the name of Jefferson's party, held its convention on May 27, 1844, in Baltimore, Maryland, a short distance from the unfolding Democratic Party convention that would select James K. Polk as nominee. Tyler was nominated the same day without challenge, accepting the honor on May 30, 1844. The Tyler delegates did not designate a vice-presidential running mate.

Democratic Party nominee James K. Polk was faced with the possibility that a Tyler ticket might shift votes away from the Democrats and provide Clay with the margin of victory in a close race. Tyler made clear in his nomination acceptance speech that his overriding concern was the ratification of his Texas annexation treaty. Moreover, he hinted that he would drop out of the race once that end was assured, informing Polk, through Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, that his campaign efforts were simply a vehicle to mobilize support for Texas annexation. Tyler concentrated his resources in the states of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, all highly contested states in the election. Securing enough Democratic support, his withdrawal might prove indispensable to Polk.

Polk was receptive as long as Tyler could withdraw without raising suspicion of a secret bargain. To solidify Tyler's cooperation, Polk enlisted Andrew Jackson to reassure Tyler that Texas annexation would be consummated under a Polk administration. On August 20, 1844, Tyler dropped out of the presidential race, and Tylerites moved quickly to support the Democratic Party nominee.

Liberty Party
The Liberty Party held its 1843 national convention on August 30 in Buffalo, New York, with 148 delegates from twelve states in attendance. James G. Birney, the party's presidential nominee in the 1840 election, was renominated with 108 votes on the first ballot (Thomas Morris and William Jay received 2 and 1 votes respectively). Morris would go on to be nominated for vice-president with 83 votes compared to Gerrit Smith's 22 and Alvan Stewart's 1. The party received 2.3% of the popular vote in the election, which was the highest it ever received.

Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith, the mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, and founder of the Latter-day Saint movement, ran as an independent under the newly created Reform Party with Sidney Rigdon as his running mate. He proposed the abolition of slavery through compensation by selling public lands and decreasing the size and salary of Congress; the closure of prisons; the annexation of Texas, Oregon, and parts of Canada; the securing of international rights on high seas; free trade; and the re-establishment of a national bank. His top aide Brigham Young campaigned for Smith saying, "He it is that God of Heaven designs to save this nation from destruction and preserve the Constitution." The campaign ended when he was attacked and killed by a mob while in the Carthage, Illinois, jail on June 27, 1844.

Results
Polk's adoption of Manifest Destiny paid dividends at the polls. No longer identified with the Tyler-Calhoun "southern crusade for slavery", the western Democrats could embrace Texas annexation. The Democrats enjoyed a huge upsurge in voter turnout, up to 20% over the figures from 1840, especially in the Northwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. The Whigs showed only a 4% increase.

The Democrats won Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana and nearly took Ohio, where the concept of Manifest Destiny was most admired. In the Deep South, Clay lost every state to Polk, a huge reversal from the 1840 race, but carried most of the Middle and Border South. Clay's "waffling" on Texas may have cost him the 41 electoral votes of New York and Michigan. The former slaveholder, now abolitionist, James Birney of the Liberty Party, received 15,812 and 3,632 votes, respectively, based on his unwavering stand against Texas annexation.

Celebratory shots rang out in Washington on November 7 as returns came in from western New York which clinched the state and the presidency for Polk. Polk won by a mere 5,106 out of 470,062 cast in New York, and only 3,422 out of 52,096 votes in Michigan. Had enough of these voting blocks cast their ballots for the anti-annexationist Clay in either state, he would have defeated Polk. Still, Clay's opposition to annexation and western slavery expansion served him well among Northern Whigs and nearly secured him the election.

As of 2020, Clay was the third of seven presidential nominees to win a significant number of electoral votes in at least three elections, the others being Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. Of these, Jackson, Cleveland, and Roosevelt also won the popular vote in at least three elections. Clay and Bryan are the only two candidates to lose the presidency three times.

This is the most recent presidential election where the election took place on different days in different states. It is the only presidential election in which both major party nominees were former Speakers of the House. This was the last election in which Ohio voted for the Whigs. It was also the only presidential election in which the winner, Polk, lost both his birth state of North Carolina and his state of residence, Tennessee, (which he lost by only 123 votes) before Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election. This was the first of four times that a victorious candidate lost their home state followed by 1916, 1968, and 2016.

Consequences
Polk's election confirmed that Manifest Destiny had majority support in the electorate despite Whig opposition. The annexation of Texas was formalized on March 1, 1845, days before Polk took office. Mexico refused to accept the annexation and the Mexican–American War broke out in 1846. Instead of demanding all of Oregon, Polk compromised. Washington and London negotiated the Buchanan–Pakenham Treaty, which split up the Oregon Territory between the two countries.

Allegations of fraud
Upon the conclusion of the election, Whig publications were disheartened at Henry Clay's loss against Polk's alleged fraud. The Whig Almanac, a yearly collection of political statistics and events of interest to the party, contained in 1845 a column alleging fraud in Louisiana. It noted that, in one Louisiana parish, Plaquemines, the vote tally exploded from a 240 to 40 vote victory for the Van Buren ticket in 1840 to a 1007 to 37 vote victory for the Polk ticket in 1844. The 970 vote margin was greater than Polk's margin statewide. The 1,007 votes received by Polk exceeded the total number of all white males in the parish in 1840, despite Louisiana having a property requirement to vote. A steward, pilot, and passenger of the steamboat Agnes reportedly said that the ship ferried voters from New Orleans to Plaquemines parish where the steward was pushed by the Captain to vote for the Polk ticket three times, despite not being of voting age. A man named Charles Bruland was seen driven out of the voting booth wounded and bloody after attempting to cast a vote for the Clay ticket in Plaquemines Parish.

Ultimately, these allegations of fraud would not have changed the election (though the Whig Almanac makes a slippery slope argument that if this fraud occurred in Louisiana, it must also have occurred in New York, which had Clay won he would have won the election), as Louisiana switching its vote would make the final count 164 electoral vote for Polk to 111 for Clay.

Source (Popular vote): Source (Electoral vote): (a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.

Results by state
Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836-1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.

States that flipped from Whig to Democratic

 * Georgia
 * Indiana
 * Louisiana
 * Maine
 * Michigan
 * Mississippi
 * New York
 * Pennsylvania

Close states
States where the margin of victory was under 1%:
 * 1)  Tennessee 0.10% (123 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 5%:
 * 1)  New York 1.05% (5,106 votes)  (tipping point state)
 * 2)  New Jersey 1.09% (823 votes)
 * 3)  Indiana 1.65% (2,314 votes)
 * 4)  Pennsylvania 1.91% (6,322 votes)
 * 5)  Ohio 1.94% (6,052 votes)
 * 6)  Georgia 2.38% (2,047 votes)
 * 7)  Delaware 2.45% (301 votes)
 * 8)  Louisiana 2.6% (699 votes)
 * 9)  Connecticut 4.63% (2,991 votes)
 * 10)  North Carolina 4.78% (3,945 votes)
 * 11)  Maryland 4.78% (3,278 votes)

States where the margin of victory was under 10%:
 * 1)  Michigan 6.03% (3,362 votes)
 * 2)  Virginia 6.1% (5,819 votes)
 * 3)  Kentucky 8.18% (9,261 votes)