US Presidential Elections

The table below shows the results of elections for the President of the United States between 1788 and 2020.

1788-1800: President and Vice President

Prior to 1804, the President and Vice President were elected in the same ballot. Electors cast two votes; the person with the most votes would become President, and the person with the second-most votes would become Vice President. This was changed by the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, which introduced separate ballots for President and Vice President.

The major political parties in this period were the Federalist Party (founded by Alexander Hamilton) and the Republican Party (founded by Thomas Jefferson). It is important to note that this was a different Republican Party than the one that nominated Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

1804-1832: President

After losing the election of 1800, the Federalists never won a US-wide election again. Jefferson's Republican Party won every election for the next 24 years.

 

By 1824, the Federalists had completely collapsed. Four Republicans ran against each other in the 1824 election, with no one candidate winning a majority of electoral votes. John Quincy Adams was then elected President by the House of Representatives, defeating Andrew Jackson (who had won the most electoral votes).

 

Jackson would found the Democratic Party shortly after his 1824 defeat, whilst Adams would go on to form the National Republican Party (initially known as the Anti-Jacksonian Party).

1832-2020: President

The popular vote totals prior to 1832 should not be viewed as being completely representative of the United States as a whole, as many states prior to 1832 did not select their electors via a popular vote. Instead, state legislatures chose the electors for their state.

From 1832 onwards, however, every state used the popular vote to choose their electors (with the exception of South Carolina, which did not adopt a popular vote for Presidential electors until 1868).

Notes

1) It should be noted that the Electoral Vote totals in these tables represent the number of pledged electors won by each candidate; the final tally may differ from these pledged totals. In the vast majority of cases, electors voted for the candidates to which they were pledged.

The sources for these results are as follows:

US Election Atlas: www.uselectionatlas.org

OurCampaigns: www.ourcampaigns.com