Lincoln wins the presidency on less than 40 percent of the vote
By the autumn of 1860, the Democratic Party had split into Northern and Southern factions, and voters faced four presidential candidates instead of two. On November 6, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won 180 of 303 electoral votes and 1,865,908 popular votes, less than 40 percent of the national total. He defeated Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge and John Bell. His support came almost entirely from free states, and he won no electoral votes in the slave states.
The Republican platform opposed extending slavery into the federal territories, and a majority in the Electoral College now stood behind it. Seven Deep South states had seceded by Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. The election set the terms of the secession crisis that followed.
QWhen did Congress make Lincoln's victory official, and how much of the secession crisis had already happened by then?
Congress counted and certified the electoral votes in joint session on February 13, 1861. That was 99 days after the ballots were cast on November 6, 1860. The count came with the secession crisis well underway. Seven Deep South states had left the Union by Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, and the certification fell only 19 days before that date. The full gap between election day and inauguration ran 118 days. For nearly four months, Lincoln held a victory the voters had decided but that Congress had not yet formally recognized in the Capitol. The joint session was the final step before he took office.
QIf all of Lincoln's rivals had pooled their electoral votes, would it have changed the outcome?
No. Lincoln's 180 electoral votes left 123 of the 303 for Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell together. Even if one candidate had received all 123, Lincoln would still have won by 57 electoral votes. The arithmetic matters because the opposition's split is often cited as the reason Lincoln won with so small a share of the popular vote. In the Electoral College as it was cast, though, his lead over the combined field was large. The four-way race shaped his popular percentage far more than it shaped his electoral result. The 303-vote total was the figure every candidate was measured against.
QHow many votes were cast in 1860 if Lincoln's 1,865,908 was under 40 percent of the total?
The national total had to exceed roughly 4.66 million ballots. That figure comes from dividing Lincoln's 1,865,908 votes by 0.40, since his share fell below that mark. It means the other candidates together drew more than 2.79 million votes. Those votes were spread across Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell, so no single rival matched Lincoln's total, but the combined opposition outnumbered him by nearly a million. Lincoln became the 16th president with a plurality of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote. The two counts measured the same election in different ways.
