Out of the Bag: Race to the White House:

History's Greatest Presidential Battles

by Noel Agnew

With the General election now just months away, The Brownbag takes a look back at some of the best races for the White House since George Washington first took the Presidency in 1789….

1812: The Republican incumbent and fourth President James Madison faced a challenge from Federalist DeWitt Clinton in this election. It took place against a backdrop of war with Britain, which had divided opinion. Clinton was able to capture all of the New England states except Vermont, while the South went solidly for Madison. In the end Madison was victorious, taking 128 of the electoral votes to Clinton’s 89. What came to be known as ‘Madison’s war’ ended in 1815 in a state of status quo ante bellum, meaning literally, as things were before the war.

1844: James Polk had caused a stunning upset by securing the Democratic nomination ahead of the former President Martin van Bueren. Polk was firmly in favor of adding Texas to the Union, while van Bueren had expressed concerns about absorbing such a large slave-holding territory into The United States. Polk’s main competition in the General Election came from Henry Clay of the Whig Party. Given the public mood, Clay felt forced to give a lukewarm support to the annexation of Texas himself, but this proved fatal, as he lost the support of anti-slavery Whigs, particularly in New York. This allowed Polk to squeeze home, taking the popular vote by 49.5% to 48.1%.

1960: The Democrats selected a young Catholic named John F. Kennedy to challenge the Republican Vice-President Richard Nixon. Eisenhower’s sitting government had been a popular one, but a downturn in the economy, alongside Soviet gains in the Space Race and Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, left many wanting change. Four televised debates were held, in which Nixon emphasized his experience and Kennedy’s lack of it. The election was more fiercely contested in the media than ever before, with Kennedy making large gains in urban areas and states with significant Catholic populations. Nixon carried his native California and also fared well in the Midwest and South, although Kennedy took Texas. When the dust settled, JFK was the new President, winning one of the closest races in history, his popular vote 49.7% to Nixon’s 49.5%.

1976: The fallout from the Watergate scandal overshadowed the political landscape at the time of this election. Gerald Ford had been in the White House for two years following Nixon’s resignation, famously granting Nixon an unconditional pardon for any “offences against the United States”. The pardon was controversial; some claimed that a deal had been done to exonerate the former President. This suspicion and the downturn in the economy hurt Ford, allowing Democrat Jimmy Carter to squeak a narrow victory, by 50% to 48% of the popular vote. This despite Carter, a born-again Christian, admitting in a Playboy interview that he “looked on a lot of women with lust”. The subsequent furor was damaging, but not enough to completely derail the campaign.

2000: This bitterly contested race left Democratic nominee Al Gore a loser despite garnering more votes than George W. Bush: 51,003,926 to 50,460,110. Bush’s Electoral College victory hinged upon the polls in Florida, which after a recount gave Bush the win by an astounding margin of just 537 of 5.8 million votes cast. The Democrats sued to overturn the results, but five weeks later the Supreme Court upheld the original decision. Gore supporters have complained bitterly ever since that hundreds of invalid overseas ballots were counted in favor of Bush in Florida, effectively hijacking the Presidency of the United States.