He never fully did so, certainly not at book length. When I visited him there, a few years later, he said he would eventually get around to confronting that bitter experience, just not yet. After losing the final battle before the Supreme Court, Gore soon departed Washington to brood in Nashville. In the ballot of 2000, Albert Gore, Jr., Bill Clinton’s Vice-President for eight years, won half a million more votes than the governor of Texas, George W.

Now, he said, “I can retire to private life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.” Hayes, in 1876 and yet, after the baroque, months-long struggle inside the Electoral College, Tilden seemed almost relieved.

In 1888, Grover Cleveland lost in much the same manner to Benjamin Harrison, but then avenged his humbling four years later. Jackson, whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office, charged that he had been undone by a rigged ballot. 68, would block the rise of a leader with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” An extra layer of electoral deliberation, he thought, would also insulate the American system from a hostile hack from abroad-“the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”Īndrew Jackson was the first to suffer this constitutionally enabled result of losing-while-winning, when he conceded the 1824 race to John Quincy Adams. The Electoral College, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper No. Southerners were wary of a challenge to slavery others feared the emergence of a national demagogue.

The Founders, for varying reasons, distrusted popular democracy. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, as she puts it, won “more votes for President than any white man” in American history, is not the first candidate to capture the popular vote but lose the election.

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