Talk Elections

I know for a fact that there have been 4 instances in US election history where the candidate with fewer popular votes won the presidency.

I have managed to find 3 of these:

1876 - Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Samuel J. Tilden
1888 - Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland
2000- George W. Bush defeated Al Gore

Can someone tell me what the 4th such instance was? I can't seem to find it.

Thanks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1824

thanks a lot. appreciate it.

1824 is disputable though.  Even among the states that put the matter up to a popular vote, only Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and possibly Alabama (votes were recorded for Clay in Alabama, but were few enough to make me think they may have been write-ins) had all four of the principal candidates on the ballot.  That makes it difficult to judge how the matter would have gone had there truly been a national vote, though I agree the available evidence suggests a Jackson plurality.

Also the EV would have quite different had the winner-take all rules now common had been in place then.  Adams managed to win the PV in both Illinois and Maryland, yet Jackson got most of eth EV's in both States.

Adams 92 (CT, IL, MA, MD, NH, NY, RI, VT)
Jackson 91 (AL, IN, LA, MS, NJ, NC, PA, SC, TN)
Crawford 36 (DE, GA, VA)
Clay 33 (KY, MO, OH)

Note that Adams comes in first in the EV in such a case, albeit not by enough to avoid going to Congress.

The case has been made for 1960, as well, where it depends on how you count Alabama's votes.  It had been decided in a Democratic primary that they would put up a slate of 11 electors, 5 of whom were obliged to vote for Kennedy and 6 of whom were free to vote for anybody.  This is in contrast to other Southern states (Louisiana and Mississippi), where all Democratic electors were Kennedy electors and there was a separate slate for Unpledged Electors.  In Mississippi, the Unpledged Electors won the election with 39% of the vote (to Kennedy's 36%) and the state's electoral votes (they, together with the six Unpledged Alabama electors and one faithless Republican elector from Oklahoma, voted for Harry Byrd).  In Louisiana, the Unpledged Electors came in third with 21%.

Essentially, given that there was no separate "Unpledged" line in Alabama and that the electorate knew that 6 of the electoral votes of Alabama, if won by the Democrats, would go to Unpledged Electors, can we really say that all 318,303 votes for the Democratic ticket in Alabama were really votes for Kennedy?   (as opposed to the Unpledged slate)

Generally (and on this site), all of the Democratic votes in Alabama are counted for Kennedy, giving Kennedy a 112,827 vote lead over Nixon in the popular vote--a smaller margin than the number of Democratic votes in Alabama.  If you think that more than 35% of the Democratic votes in Alabama were not really for Kennedy (as the results of the Democratic primary would seem to suggest), then Nixon would, by that count, receives more votes than Kennedy nationwide.  If you divide up Alabama's Democratic vote 6-to-5, Nixon beats Kennedy nationwide, 34,108,157 to 34,047,364.

To get back to the gist of your question, however, most sources do consider Kennedy to be the popular vote winner--the argument that Nixon won the PV in 1960 is a rather technical one that's mainly reserved for places like this.

Generally, 1824 is considered to be that "fourth election," although do read Ernest's very good comments on that subject.

1960 - John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeated Richard Milhous Nixon

Hey, how about 1880? That one had a closer popular vote.

There are three or arguably four such instances. *Shrugs.*