Electing presidents the way the Founding Fathers expected us to
In the history of the United States, the 1824 presidential election is generally considered one of the weirdest presidential elections…
In the history of the United States, the 1824 presidential election is generally considered one of the weirdest presidential elections ever. This election was won by John Quincy Adams. The basic story of what happened is that Adams placed second in the Electoral College, while Andrew Jackson placed first.
However, since electoral votes were divided between four different candidates, Jackson didn’t have a majority. This meant that there needed to be a House contingent election between the top three candidates — Jackson, Adams, and William Crawford.
The fourth place candidate, Henry Clay, was excluded from this election. However, as Speaker of the House, he was highly influential, and he put his support behind Adams in the election.
The election of 1824 was unusual both in terms of party politics and electoral mechanics… but it was also the election that was closest to what the Founding Fathers thought would be normal when they designed and approved the presidential election system.
This is what many of the Framers expected
When you look over the records of the debates at the Constitutional Convention, it’s clear that the Framers did not anticipate political parties, political campaigning, or a two-candidate system, and they didn’t expect states to choose presidential electors in an at-large popular vote. States were left to be free to select presidential electors using different methods, it is true; but the two methods under close consideration involved either selection of electors by state legislatures or a district-based election system.
Not even the 1824 election is a perfect example of what the Founding Fathers intended. Most states were already using at-large winner-take-all elections to choose presidential electors. A brief list of some of the oddities of the 1824 election:
The candidate with the most popular votes (Andrew Jackson) lost.
The candidate with the most electoral votes (also Andrew Jackson) lost.
There were four major candidates (with each winning >10% of the popular and electoral vote).
Multiple candidates ran from the same party.
There were no major candidates from an opposing party.
The election was decided by the House of Representatives.
The losing candidate went on to win the next presidential election.
Some presidential candidates also received votes as vice presidential candidates.
No other American presidential election stands out from the other elections in quite as many ways, and we’ve had some strange ones.
Other odd elections
In 1800, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, but this happened within a two-party system in a fairly normal way, and the House’s role was limited to breaking the tie between Democratic-Republican presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, leading eventually to the expected outcome (Thomas Jefferson becoming president) and contributing to the passage of the 12th Amendment in order to avoid similar unintended problems in the future.
In 1860, there were four major candidates (two from the Democratic party). This is the election that led to the Civil War… but while the political stakes involved with a presidential election have never been higher than in 1860, Abraham Lincoln won a plurality of the popular vote in order to win, and his opponents didn’t come from within his own party.
In 1888, the losing candidate, Grover Cleveland, won the popular vote and came back to win the next presidential election — but there were only two major candidates, the election took place in a stable two-party system, and the popular vote margin was fairly close.
The election of 1824 was the most unique presidential election in American history. However, its unique circumstances were closer to the expectations of the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College without a good understanding of how democratic politics would evolve within the United States.
What the Founding Fathers expected
Few (if any!) of those present at the Constitutional Connvention anticipated national political parties consolidating behind candidates.
Most delegates to the Constitutional Convention thought most potential presidents - after George Washington - would enjoy the support of comparatively few electors from outside of their home states. They thought that only rarely would a single person enjoy such a dominant level of popularity as George Washington did at the time. Instead, most potential presidents would have trouble standing out in comparison to their peers.
This expectation is visible in the records we have on what was argued at the Constitutional Convention.
At the time, it seemed common sense that each elector would usually cast one of their two votes for a candidate from their own state. Some delegates (notably Gouverneur Morris) thought that requiring a second vote from electors would be enough to put a majority vote within reach of a candidate with ordinary levels of popularity, but others (notably George Mason) thought it would almost never happen in spite of that.
In more typical circumstances, the Electoral College would therefore serve as a nominating body, narrowing a broad field of contenders down to the top five nominees, who would either be from large states or be nationally prominent people with broad support across multiple states. The House of Representatives, using the old 1 vote per state delegation rule of the Continental Congress, would then choose one of those candidates to be the president.
The “one vote per state delegation” rule was a compromise used to appease small state delegates: After all, the large states would have a significant advantage in the nominating process.
Five nominees was similarly a compromise — those who preferred more involvement by the legislature or came from smaller states favored a larger number of nominees considered by the House, while those who preferred a more democratically elected president and those from larger states preferred a smaller number of nominees (such as three).
James Madison and other more populist delegates also tried to lower the threshold for automatic election from a majority (greater than one half) to a plurality of at least one third, in order to try to keep the legislature out of the presidential election process. This measure failed. Few presidential elections have had the broad field of candidates the Founding Fathers expected, or been decided by the House.
The election of 1824 seems strange today, but I like to think of it as a rare example of the American presidential election system working as it was originally intended to work.