11 of the most bizarre elections in American history
The 2020 election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden is perhaps the craziest, most controversial election in US history.
We say perhaps because we don’t want to bog you down with superlatives when there have been so many truly zany moments in American elections.
Who could forget Howard Dean screaming like he’d lost a limb, or Rick Perry forgetting one of the three federal agencies he’d cut if elected?
Then there’s the bevy of oh-so-colorful characters, from Jello Biafra, Joan Jett Blakk and Wavy Gravy to Lee Mercer, Jack Shepard and Lyndon LaRouche. Did we mention Deez Nuts?
To say an election was the craziest or most controversial simply isn’t objective. Sure, Trump has claimed victory despite Biden’s projected win, questioned the voting system’s integrity and suggested he might not step down, but is that more controversial than Congress picking a president? That’s happened a few times.
We’ll let you decide. So, without any superlatives, here are 11 fascinating elections in American history:
1800: Prelude to a duel
The outcome of the 1800 contest between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was so bizarre, the United States had to amend the Constitution.
Pre-12th Amendment, Electoral College members each had two votes for president, and there were no official tickets. Whoever garnered the most votes was president, and second place took the vice presidency.
Though problems with the system were apparent in 1796, the election of 1800 saw Jefferson tie with his Democratic-Republican “running mate” Aaron Burr. Both had 73 votes to Adams’ 65.
Congress would be called upon to break the tie. Enter Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary, founder of the Federalist Party and a man who did not care for Adams, Jefferson or Burr.
Nonetheless, Hamilton engaged in a campaign to convince the Federalists to vote for Jefferson, his lesser of three evils, writing in a letter that “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself — thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement.”
The House of Representatives didn’t easily arrive at its decision, casting 35 ballots in a week before finally voting to name Jefferson the victor and Burr the veep on February 7, 1801.
Making the election all the zanier, the rivalry between Burr and Hamilton would continue for more than three years before Burr, still the sitting vice president, killed Hamilton in a duel.
1824: ‘Corrupt bargain’
This one was odd from the get-go, if only for the fact that the Federalist Party was on the cusp of extinction and all four candidates were Democratic-Republicans.
Andrew Jackson, a war hero and statesman, won the popular vote by fewer than 39,000 ballots and took 99 Electoral College votes. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams secured 84, Treasury Secretary William Crawford won 41 and House Speaker Henry Clay had 37.
With no candidate earning a majority of the votes, the House again had to settle the deadlock, and Jackson was confident he would win the presidency given that he had won the popular vote and Electoral College. Because the House could choose among only three candidates, Clay got the boot.
We mentioned Clay was speaker, yes?
Well, after a month of horse trading, many of Clay’s supporters shifted their support to Adams, who would go on to win the majority of the House vote. Maryland, Illinois and Louisiana, which had cast most of their Electoral College votes for Jackson, as well as Kentucky, where Adams did not receive a single ballot in the popular vote, decided to back Adams.
After his inauguration, Adams selected Clay as his secretary of state. Jackson was furious and accused Adams and Clay of a “corrupt bargain.” He vacated his Senate seat and vowed to win the 1828 election as a Washington outsider.
Backed by his new party, the Democrats, Jackson made good on the promise, besting Adams, who by then was a leader in the National Republican Party.
1860: Nation divided
This election wasn’t particularly close. Abraham Lincoln trounced John Breckinridge in an election that had one of the highest voter turnouts of all time.
No, the 1860 election was notable because it ripped the long-dominant Democratic Party — and thereby, the nation — in half.
The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, essentially legalizing slavery in all U.S. territories, had laid the battleground: The Republican Party largely opposed slavery but was reluctant to push for its prohibition in states that already had it, and the Democrats were unable at their 1860 convention to establish an official party line on slavery.
At a second convention that year, the Democrats nominated Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, but many Southerners in the party defected and selected Breckinridge, who was vice president, as their man. Both would claim to be the official Democratic candidate.
The Constitutional Union Party, which had formed the year before and staged a campaign that basically ignored the issue of slavery, selected Sen. John Bell of Tennessee.
The Electoral College vote told the story. Lincoln snared only 40% of the popular vote, but in the Electoral College took most of the North, along with California and Oregon. Douglas came in second in the popular vote but took only Missouri (and three votes in New Jersey). Breckinridge took most of the South, along with Maryland and Delaware, and Bell’s middle-of-the-road policies earned him the middle of the road: Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.
Weeks after the election, South Carolina voted to secede, followed by six more Southern states. In February 1861, delegates from those states formed the Confederate States of America and selected Jefferson Davis as their president.
In April, a South Carolina militia would take Fort Sumter, and four more states would join the Confederacy.
1872: Death of a candidate
Set aside that 1872 was the year suffragette Victoria Woodhull of the People’s Party became the first woman to run for president. Also, forget that writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, her running mate, was the first African-American to be considered for the vice presidency. And never mind this was the year Susan B. Anthony would be arrested for illegal voting.
No, 1872 was strange because one of the primary candidates never saw the final Electoral College vote.
Horace Greeley wasn’t supposed to put up much of a fight in his bid to unseat President Ulysses S. Grant, but a schism in Grant’s Republican Party made things a little more interesting.
Grant, who led the Union armies that defeated the Confederacy, had not been so convincing in the Oval Office. The White House website describes him as out of his element and quotes one visitor who spoke of his “puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms.”
Some Republicans defected, becoming Liberal Republicans, and cast their lot with Greeley, a Democrat who would go on to snare 44% of the popular vote, almost 3 million ballots, despite ending his campaigning to tend to his sick wife, who died a week before the election.
Before the Electoral College could cast its votes, the newspaper founder died November 29, 1872, and 63 of his 66 votes were dispersed among Thomas Hendricks, who would later become vice president, and other Democrats.
Grant attended his rival’s funeral.
1876: Not-so-independent tiebreaker
Democrat Samuel Tilden had beaten Republican Rutherford Hayes. He snared a quarter-million more ballots in the popular vote, and he had 19 more votes in the Electoral College.
Problem was, Tilden was one Electoral College vote away from a majority of 185 votes, and four states composing a total of 20 votes — Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon — were disputing the results. In the Southern states, each party was accusing the other of fraud.
With no precedent to lean on, the two parties agreed to establish a 15-member commission made up of seven Republicans, seven Democrats and an independent.
The independent, Supreme Court Justice David Davis, however, was unexpectedly selected by the Illinois Legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate. He was replaced by Justice Joseph Bradley, a diehard Republican who would cast every vote for Hayes, providing him the 20 votes he needed for a majority.
Democrats initially threatened to block the decision, but in a backroom deal they agreed to drop their opposition if Hayes, among other provisions, removed federal troops that had been in the South under Reconstruction.
Hayes was sworn in March 5, 1877, and within weeks, he removed the troops. Reconstruction formally came to an end, halting the progress African Americans had made. It would be decades before civil rights would see serious discussion again in Congress.
1920: Prison campaign
It was a battle between two newspaper publishers, but the election wasn’t terribly exciting. Republican Warren G. Harding handed Democrat James Cox a historic beatdown, taking more than 60% of the popular vote along with 37 of the 48 states.
Third place is where it got interesting.
Long before Bernie Sanders faced jabs for his liberal politics, the Socialist Party of America enjoyed a modicum of support at the outset of the 20th century. That union leader Eugene Debs ran for president in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912 is somewhat unremarkable, as is the fact he secured roughly 6% of the popular vote in 1912, more than 900,000 ballots.
In 1920, though, Debs had to run his fifth campaign from the most unlikely of headquarters: prison.
No stranger to incarceration — he’d served time in connection with an 1894 railroad strike — Debs again drew the government’s ire in 1918 when he gave an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he pilloried “the ruling class” who made all the decisions to send the working class to war.
“Yours not to reason why. Yours but to do and die,” he said.
He was convicted under an espionage law and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Demonstrations protesting his imprisonment evolved into the May Day riots of 1919, and Debs was later moved to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, from where he conducted his presidential campaign.
He would again secure more than 900,000 votes — an impressive tally, but not nearly enough to compete with Harding, who snared more than 16 million.
The following year, on Christmas, Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served.
1948: Ultimate ‘whoops’ moment
President Harry S. Truman was done before the election began. You could stick a fork in him, to hear the pundits tell it. The election was New York Gov. Thomas Dewey’s. Period.
The 1946 midterms had handed both houses to Republicans for the first time in almost 20 years, and opinion polls showed that just one in three Americans approved of Truman’s handling of the presidency.
Making matters worse, Truman’s commerce secretary, Henry Wallace, had revolted over the administration’s foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and declared his intention to run as a third-party candidate.
Southern Democrats also jumped ship over his stance on civil rights, forming the States’ Rights Party — aka the Dixiecrats — and electing segregationist South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond as their candidate.
The final pre-election Gallup poll — interestingly, taken in mid-October and not released until the day before Election Day — showed Dewey beating Truman by 5 percentage points.
Even on Election Day, Truman recalled an NBC report predicting he would lose. It wasn’t until 4 a.m. that his Secret Service agents woke him to say he had won.
The Chicago Daily Tribune had referred to Truman as a “nincompoop” on its editorial page in the run-up to the election. Poetically, a printers’ strike forced the newspaper to publish its morning edition hours earlier than usual, and Publisher J. Loy Maloney took the pollsters’ word and signed off on one of the most famous headlines in history.
“Dewey defeats Truman.”
1960: Dawn of televised debates
John F. Kennedy set a lot of precedents when he was elected in 1960. He was the youngest president elected to office, the first at the time to be born in the 20th century. He was also the first Catholic president.
The contest between Kennedy and Richard Nixon, pitting a relatively unknown senator against a two-term sitting vice president, marked another precedent: the first time that presidential debates would be pumped into American living rooms.
This was important to the vote’s outcome because televisions were increasingly part of the American household. Eighty-eight percent of homes had them, compared with 11% in 1950.
Nixon had recently been hospitalized. He refused to wear makeup, which served to highlight his thin, sickly appearance. He had a 5 o’clock shadow. He wore a gray suit that blended into the background. His appearance left much to be desired, historians would note.
Kennedy, on the other hand, was tanned and wore a blue suit and shirt, so he stood out against the studio backdrop. Unlike Nixon, he spoke to the cameras rather than to his opponent.
The estimated 70 million people who watched the first of four televised debates, on September 26, 1960, felt Kennedy won, whereas the much smaller audience listening on the radio felt Nixon was the victor.
On November 8, Kennedy edged out Nixon by 119,000 votes (out of a total of almost 69 million).
Though it’s arguable that the debate alone won Kennedy the election (he also secured the African-American vote by offering his assistance in getting the Rev. Martin Luther Jr. out of prison just weeks before the election), politicians and historians concur this changed the face of campaigns.
Televised debates made image and appearance primary considerations, and it raised such an unsettling specter for some candidates that it would be 16 years before another presidential hopeful agreed to a televised debate.
1964: Mandate on race
This is the election that brought us the “Daisy” ad — an attempt to paint Republican Barry Goldwater as too reckless to be put in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal. The ad remains haunting even amid today’s supercharged mudslinging.
The summer of 1964 brought the Civil Rights Act. Angry Whites protested the legislation across the South, while Blacks enraged by police treatment erupted into demonstrations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities.
The stage was set for extremes, but the election would not hinge on whether Goldwater or President Lyndon Johnson was a more capable commander in chief. Race would not only shape 1964’s ballot, but it would affect elections for decades to come.
Alabama’s fiery segregationist Gov. George Wallace took on Johnson for the Democratic nomination, and despite the sentiment that “white backlash” against the Civil Rights Act was a Southern thing, Wallace received more than 30% of the vote in Wisconsin and Indiana and more than 40% in Maryland in the primaries.
Wallace would eventually drop out of the race, but not before causing both Goldwater and Johnson substantial concerns. Goldwater feared Wallace would run on a third-party ticket, sinking his campaign, and Johnson worried about Wallace’s strong showing in non-Southern states.
While Goldwater, who had cast his vote against the Civil Rights Act, was painted as a racist, something he had always denied, Johnson tried to please everyone.
That was most evident when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Black activists organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, showed up at the national convention demanding to be seated because Mississippi had run a segregated primary.
Johnson would have to broker a deal in which the segregationists were seated at the convention, along with two members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He would later anger many in the South by selecting Hubert Humphrey, a staunch civil rights advocate, as his running mate.
Johnson would go on to win one of the most lopsided elections ever. Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona and Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Republicans still enjoy a great deal of political dominance in the South to this day.
1972: Death (of a campaign) by electroshock therapy
It happened in a hasty two-minute phone call.
Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota had just won the Democratic nomination for president and phoned Sen. Thomas Eagleton to ask him to be his running mate. Several high-profile Democrats had declined to join McGovern on the ticket, so he picked Eagleton, in part, because he hoped he would help him shore up the Catholic vote.
To say Eagleton didn’t undergo the intense vetting of, say, Sarah Palin or Paul Ryan would be an understatement.
Had McGovern grilled Eagleton according to today’s standards, he might’ve learned Eagleton’s secret: that the senator from Missouri had been hospitalized three times for depression and had undergone electroshock therapy on two of those occasions.
When rumors first began to surface, McGovern stood by his running mate but eventually decided that Eagleton posed a liability.
During a news conference at a South Dakota state park, where McGovern was supposed to be relaxing, not campaigning, Eagleton revealed his medical history to reporters and explained that he had only recently divulged the matter to McGovern.
On August 1 — 18 days after he was selected — Eagleton officially dropped out of the campaign.
Richard Nixon would go on to obliterate McGovern, carrying 49 states and outpacing the Democrat by about 18 million votes — thereby striking fear into would-be presidents for decades about who they choose to join them on the ticket.
2000: Hanging chads and a single justice
It all came down to Florida, and if you think that “Dewey defeats Truman” headline was nuts, the 2000 presidential election was pure bonkers.
Vying for the deciding 25 Electoral College votes were Texas Gov. George W. Bush, whose brother was Florida’s governor, and Vice President Al Gore. Some networks called the race for Gore, others Bush. Some flipped. Gore called Bush to concede — only to call back and say never mind.
The day after voting, the Florida Division of Elections said Bush had won by 1,784 ballots, though CNN had pegged it at fewer than 1,000. A recount two days later winnowed it down to 327 votes — out of almost 6 million cast.
At issue were Florida’s punch-hole ballots, and while hanging chads — punched holes that still had a corner intact — dominated headlines, pregnant or dimpled chads, which were indented but still attached, also came into play.
Lawyers, like locusts, descended on the Sunshine State as Bush’s legal team sought to head off any potential recount. Led by James Baker — a Cabinet member and chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father — the team also included Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, who now serve on the US Supreme Court.
On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court ordered manual recounts in four counties, including the state’s most populous, Miami-Dade. Protesters — which The Wall Street Journal described as “50-year-old White lawyers with cell phones and Hermes ties” — descended on the Miami recount headquarters in what became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot. They wanted the recount shut down, and eventually, it was.
Baker and his team never wanted the race decided in a state whose courts were dominated by Democrats, and on December 9 the US Supreme Court issued a stay on the Florida high court’s decision to recount tens of thousands of ballots.
By a 5-4 margin along ideological lines, SCOTUS ruled a previous certification by the state’s Republican secretary of state could stand, propelling Bush to the 271 votes he needed to assume the Oval Office. The decision came 36 days after the election.
Dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
Subsequent reviews by news outlets and other organizations were less than illuminating, yielding myriad scenarios ranging from Gore winning by 332 votes to Bush winning by 1,665. The consensus was that Bush would have won the statewide recount ordered by Florida’s Supreme Court, while Gore would have won a recount of all disputed ballots — had his team ever requested one.
