Of the 58 presidential elections in US history, 53 of the laureates have won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. But in five incredibly close elections – including those for two of the last three presidents – the winner of the Electoral College was actually the loser of the popular vote.
Here’s how it can happen: The US president and vice president are not elected by direct popular vote. Instead, Article II, Section I of the Constitution provides for the indirect election of the highest office in the country by a group of state-appointed “voters”. Collectively, this group is known as the Electoral College.
READ MORE: What is the Electoral College and why was it created?
To win a modern presidential election, a candidate must capture 270 of the 538 total electoral votes. States are allocated electoral votes based on the number of Representatives they have in the House plus their two Senators. Voters are distributed according to the population of each state, but even the least populous states are constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of three voters (one representative and two senators).
This guaranteed minimum means that states with smaller populations end up having greater electoral college representation per capita. Wyoming, for example, has one representative in the House for all of its approximately 570,000 residents. California, a much more populous state, has 53 representatives in the House, but each of those MPs and women represents more than 700,000 Californians.
Since most states (48 plus Washington, DC) attribute all of their electoral votes to the person who wins the statewide popular vote, it is mathematically possible to gain more electoral votes while losing the popular vote. For example, if a candidate wins by significant percentages in a handful of highly populated states, for example, he is likely to win the popular vote. But if their opponent wins a group of small states with tight margins, he or she could still win the Electoral College. This is basically what happened in 2016.
Take a look at the five times a president won the White House while losing the popular vote.
John Quincy Adams (1824)
John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States.
Historical Archive / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
This is the first of two occasions when the man ultimately elected president has lost the popular vote and the electoral vote for the first time.
In 1824, there were four presidential candidates, all from the same Democratic-Republican party: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay.
When the votes were counted, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of both the popular vote and the Electoral College. But to win the presidency, it takes more than a plurality (the most electoral votes), it takes a majority (more than half), and Jackson had 32 fewer electoral votes.
In cases where no presidential candidate wins a majority of the electoral votes, the Constitution sends the vote to the House of Representatives. According to the 12th Amendment, the House can only vote on the top three vote-givers, which knocked Clay out of the race, but that hasn’t stopped Clay from allegedly exerting influence as Speaker of the House.
The House voted to make Adams president, even though Jackson had beaten Adams by 99 electoral votes to 84. Adams turned around and named Clay as his secretary of state, infuriating Jackson, who accused his opponents of stealing the election in a corrupt market.
“[T]he Judas of the West has made the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver, ”Jackson said. “Has there ever been such naked corruption in any country before?”
WATCH: ‘The Founding Fathers’ on HISTORY Vault
Rutherford B. Hayes (1876)
Rutherford B. Hayes was the 19th President of the United States.
Merritt / Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
As in 1824, the election of 1876 was not decided by the voters, but by Congress. This time, however, the Constitution had no answer to the current electoral crisis.
The race was ugly between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, and when the votes were tallied Tilden won 184 electoral votes, exactly one vote less than the majority needed at the time to win the presidency. Hayes won just 165, but another 20 electoral votes were still in dispute.
Republicans opposed the results of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, with both parties saying their candidate won the states. And now? The Constitution had a back-up plan if no candidate won a majority of the electoral votes, but there was no such process to resolve a dispute.
Congress therefore created a bipartite federal electoral commission made up of representatives of the House, senators and judges of the Supreme Court. The Commission voted to give the contested 20 electoral votes to Hayes, who won the election by the slimmest of margins: 185 to 184.
Why did the Commission decide to postpone the election to Hayes, who had lost both the popular and the electoral vote? Most historians believe that an agreement has been negotiated between the two parties. The Democrats, whose stronghold was the south, agreed to let Hayes be president in exchange for Republicans promising to withdraw all federal troops from the former Confederate states. This is one of the main reasons why the reconstruction was abandoned in 1877.
READ MORE: How the 1876 Election Effectively Ended Reconstruction
Benjamin Harrison (1888)
A portrait of President Benjamin Harrison, 1888. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Smith / Gado / Getty Images Collection
The 1888 race between incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland and Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison was riddled with corruption. Both parties accused the other of paying citizens to vote for their candidate. The so-called “floaters” were voters without party loyalty who could be sold to the highest bidder.
In Indiana, a letter surfaced that allegedly showed Republicans plotting to buy voters and disrupt the opposition’s corruption efforts. Meanwhile, Southern Democrats have done everything in their power to suppress the black vote, most of which was aligned with Republicans, the “Lincoln Party.”
When the wicked race was finally over, Cleveland and the Democrats took over the whole South while Republican Harrison won the North and West, including the home state of Cleveland, Indiana, by a slim margin. Sweeping south, Cleveland won the popular vote by over 90,000 votes, but still lost the electoral vote 233 to 168.
Four years later, Cleveland returned and defeated Harrison, becoming the first and only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms.
George W. Bush (2000)
VIDEO: How the United States Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election
Over the next 112 years, election results returned to normal, with the winner of the Electoral College also taking the popular vote. Then came the hotly contested 2000 presidential election that went to the Supreme Court.
The candidates were Republican George W. Bush, son of the former president, and Democrat Al Gore, who served as vice president under President Bill Clinton. On election night, results were too close to be announced in three states: Oregon, New Mexico and Florida. Gore ended up winning Oregon and New Mexico by the slimmest of margins (just 366 votes in New Mexico), which left Florida to decide on the presidency.
The Florida race was so close that state law required a recount. When Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris declared Bush the winner by 537 votes, Gore filed a lawsuit claiming that not all the ballots had been counted. There were still piles of punched cards that had been put aside due to voter errors leading to anomalies called “hanging chads”, “pregnant chads” and “honeycomb chads”.
The Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, but Bush appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately voted 5-4 to overturn the Florida court decision and end the recount. With Florida in hand, Bush won the Electoral College 271-266, while Gore ended up getting 500,000 more votes in the popular vote.
READ MORE: How Sandra Day O’Connor’s deciding vote decided the 2000 election
Donald Trump (2016)
VIDEO: America 101: What is a contested election?
In a surprise victory that defied most pre-election polls, foreign Republican candidate Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, wife of former President Bill Clinton, despite Hillary Clinton receiving 2.8 million more votes in the popular vote – the biggest disparity yet.
Clinton performed very well in major cities and populous states like California and New York, where she beat Trump by 30 percentage points and 22.5 percentage points respectively. But Trump saw narrow wins in battlefield states like Wisconsin (0.8%), Pennsylvania (0.7%), and Michigan (0.2%).
In the end, Trump may have lost the popular vote by the millions, but he won the Electoral College convincingly with 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227.
