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294 members of theElectoral College 148 electoral votes needed to win | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 80.3%[2] 23.9pp | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Presidential election results map.Yellow denotes states won by Harrison/Tyler andBlue by Van Buren. Numbers indicate the number ofelectoral votes cast by each state. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential elections were held in theUnited States from October 30 to December 2, 1840. In the shadow of an incomplete economic recovery from thePanic of 1837,Whig nomineeWilliam Henry Harrison defeated incumbent PresidentMartin Van Buren of theDemocratic Party. The election marked the first of two Whig victories in presidential elections, but was the only one where they won a majority of the popular vote. This was also the third rematch in American history.
In 1839, the Whigs held a national convention for the first time. The1839 Whig National Convention saw 1836 nominee William Henry Harrison defeat former Secretary of StateHenry Clay and GeneralWinfield Scott. Van Buren faced little opposition at the1840 Democratic National Convention, but controversial Vice PresidentRichard Mentor Johnson was not renominated. The Democrats thus became the only major party since 1800 to fail to select a vice presidential nominee.
Referencing vice presidential nomineeJohn Tyler and Harrison's participation in theBattle of Tippecanoe, the Whigs campaigned on the slogan of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." With Van Buren weakened by economic woes, Harrison won a popular majority and 234 of 294electoral votes. Voter participation surged as white male suffrage became nearly universal,[3] and a contemporary record of 42.4% of the voting age population voted for Harrison.[4] Van Buren's loss made him the third president to lose re-election.
The Whigs did not enjoy the benefits of victory. The 67-year-old Harrison, the oldest U.S. president elected untilRonald Reagan won the1980 election, died a little more than a month after inauguration. Harrison was succeeded by John Tyler, who unexpectedly proved not to be a Whig. While Tyler had been a staunch supporter of Clay at the convention, he was a former Democrat, a passionate supporter of states' rights, and effectively an independent. As President, Tyler blocked the Whigs' legislative agenda and was expelled from the Whig Party, subsequently the second independent (after Washington) to serve as president. Van Buren would be the last incumbent president to lose his reelection bid in a general election until fellow DemocratGrover Cleveland in1888. This was also the last time a challenger to an incumbent President got a majority of the vote until1932. This was also the last time as of 2024 where the incumbent president seeking re-election flipped a state yet failed to secure re-election, with Van Buren winning South Carolina, despite losing it four years earlier, and losing re-election to Harrison.
| 1840 Whig Party ticket | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| William Henry Harrison | John Tyler | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| for President | for Vice President | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| United States Minister for Gran Columbia (1829) | U.S. Senator fromVirginia (1827–1836) President pro tempore of the Senate (1835) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Campaign | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The first national convention of the Whig Party was called for by members of the party in Congress and it was attended by almost 250 delegates inHarrisburg, Pennsylvania.Henry Clay, William Henry Harrison, andWinfield Scott ran for the party's presidential nomination. The delegations of each state balloted separately before meeting together with the other representatives of the states. Clay initially led on the first ballot, but Harrison won on the final ballot with 148 votes compared to Clay's 90 votes and Scott's 16 votes after supporters from Scott switched to Harrison.John Tyler was selected as a factional and geographical balance to Harrison.[5]
| 1840 Democratic Party ticket | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Martin Van Buren | None | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| for President | for Vice President | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 8th President of the United States (1837–1841) | N/A | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Democratic members of theNew Hampshire General Court made a call for the1840 Democratic National Convention which was held inBaltimore, Maryland in May 1840. Delegates from twenty-two states attended the convention, but the sizes of the delegations varied with New Jersey having fifty-nine delegates to cast its eight votes while Massachusetts only had one delegate to cast its fourteen votes.[5]
A committee was formed to make recommendations for the nominations and the committee supported Van Buren for renomination which was approved by acclamation. However, the vice-presidential nomination was left vacant due to opposition to Vice PresidentRichard M. Johnson's personal life.[5]
After the negative views of Freemasonry among a large segment of the public began to wane in the mid-1830s, theAnti-Masonic Party disintegrated. Many leaders began to move to the Whig party. Remaining leaders met in September 1837 in Washington, and agreed to maintain the party. The third Anti-Masonic Party National Convention was held in Philadelphia on November 13–14, 1838. By this time, the party had been almost entirely supplanted by the Whigs. The delegates unanimously voted to nominate William Henry Harrison for president (who the party had supported for president the previous election along withFrancis Granger for vice president) andDaniel Webster for vice president. However, when the Whig National Convention nominated Harrison with John Tyler as his running mate, the Anti-Masonic Party did not make an alternate nomination and ceased to function and was fully absorbed into the Whigs by 1840.
| Presidential vote | Vice presidential vote | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| William Henry Harrison | 119 | Daniel Webster | 119 |
James G. Birney,Myron Holley,Joshua Leavitt, andGerrit Smith proposed the creation of an anti-slavery party. In July 1839, two resolutions proposed by Holley at theAmerican Anti-Slavery Society's meeting in Cleveland, called for the creation of an abolitionist party. They failed. Nevertheless, the supporters nominated Birney andFrancis Julius LeMoyne as a presidential ticket at a meeting inWarsaw, New York. However, Birney declined the presidential nomination as he preferred a nomination to be made by a regular body of abolitionists and LeMoyne also declined the vice-presidential nomination. Smith and Holley made a call for an abolitionist nominating convention to be held on April 1, 1840, inAlbany, New York. 121 delegates attended the delegation and selected a presidential ticket of Birney andThomas Earle. which was accepted. It took the nameLiberty Party.[6]
Birney was unable to campaign during the election as he was in England until November. The Liberty Party received opposition from followers ofWilliam Lloyd Garrison and abolitionist Whigs. The Liberty Party received 7,453 votes.[6]
In the wake of thePanic of 1837, Van Buren was widely unpopular, and Harrison, followingAndrew Jackson's strategy, ran as a war hero and man of the people while presenting Van Buren as a wealthy snob living in luxury at the public expense. Although Harrison was comfortably wealthy and well educated, his "log cabin" image caught fire, sweeping all sections of the country.
Harrison avoided campaigning on the issues, with his Whig Party attracting a broad coalition with few common ideals. The Whig strategy overall was to win the election by avoiding discussion of difficult national issues such as slavery or the national bank and concentrate instead on exploiting dissatisfaction over the failed policies of the Van Buren administration with colorful campaigning techniques.
Harrison was the first president to campaign actively for office. He did so with the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too". Tippecanoe referred toHarrison's military victory over a group ofShawnee Native Americans at a river in Indiana calledTippecanoe in 1811. For their part, Democrats laughed at Harrison for being too old for the presidency, and referred to him as "Granny", hinting that he was senile. Said one Democratic newspaper: "Give him a barrel ofhard cider, and ... a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year ... and ... he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin."[7]
Whigs took advantage of this quip and declared that Harrison was "the log cabin and hard cider candidate", a man of the common people from the rough-and-tumble West. They depicted Harrison's opponent, PresidentMartin Van Buren, as a wealthy snob who was out of touch with the people. In fact, it was Harrison who came from a family of wealthy planters, while Van Buren's father was a tavernkeeper. Harrison however moved to the frontier and for years lived in a log cabin, while Van Buren had been a well-paid government official.[citation needed]
Nonetheless, the election was held in the wake of the Panic of 1837, one of the worst economic depressions in the nation's history,[8] and voters blamed Van Buren, seeing him as unsympathetic to struggling citizens. Harrison campaigned vigorously and won.
31.9% of the voting age population and 80.3% of eligible voters participated in the election.[9] This was the first time that a majority of southern voters participated in the election. (A majority in the north had first participated in an election in 1828.)[10]
Harrison won the support of western settlers and eastern bankers alike. Of the 1,179 counties/independent cities making returns, Harrison won in 699 (59.29%) while Van Buren carried 477 (40.46%). Three counties (0.25%) in the South split evenly between Harrison and Van Buren.
The extent of Van Buren's unpopularity was evident in Harrison's victories in New York, the president's home state, and in Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson himself had come out of retirement to stump for his former vice-president.
This was the first time a Democratic president lost re-election, as well as the first of only two times (the other being 1980) that a Democratic president lost re-election and lost the popular vote.
This was also the first election in U.S. history in which a candidate won more than a million popular votes.
This was the last election where Indiana voted for the Whigs. It was also the only election where the Whigs won Maine, Michigan, and Mississippi. The election was also the last time that a majority of voters in Mississippi voted against the Democrats until 1872, the last in which a majority of voters in Indiana voted against Democrats until 1860, and the last in which a majority of voters in Maine and Michigan voted against Democrats until 1856. This is the only election in American history in which a majority of voters in Alabama and a majority of voters in Mississippi voted for different candidates.
The 1840 presidential election was the only time in which four people who either had been or would become a U.S. President (Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, and Polk) received at least one vote in the Electoral College when it voted for president and vice-president.[11]
Harrison's victory won him precious little time as chief executive of the United States. After giving thelongest inauguration speech in U.S. history (lasting about 1 hour and 45 minutes, in cold weather and rain), Harrison served only one month as president before dying of pneumonia on April 4, 1841.
| Presidential candidate | Party | Home state | Popular vote(a) | Electoral vote | Running mate | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Percentage | Vice-presidential candidate | Home state | Electoral vote | ||||
| William Henry Harrison | Whig | Ohio | 1,275,583 | 52.87% | 234 | John Tyler | Virginia | 234 |
| Martin Van Buren (incumbent) | Democratic | New York | 1,129,645 | 46.82% | 60 | Richard Mentor Johnson (incumbent) | Kentucky | 48 |
| Littleton W. Tazewell | Virginia | 11 | ||||||
| James K. Polk | Tennessee | 1 | ||||||
| James G. Birney | Liberty | New York | 7,453 | 0.31% | 0 | Thomas Earle | Pennsylvania | 0 |
| Other | 13 | 0.00% | — | Other | — | |||
| Total | 2,412,694 | 100% | 294 | 294 | ||||
| Needed to win | 148 | 148 | ||||||
Source (Popular Vote):Leip, David."1840 Presidential Election Results".Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. RetrievedJuly 27, 2005.Source (Electoral Vote):"Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996".National Archives and Records Administration. RetrievedJuly 31, 2005.[12]
(a)The popular vote figures excludeSouth Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.
| Harrison | 52.88% | |||
| Van Buren | 46.81% | |||
| Others | 0.31% | |||
| Harrison | 79.59% | |||
| Van Buren | 20.41% | |||
Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham,Presidential ballots, 1836–1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–257.
| States/districts won byVan Buren |
| States/districts won byHarrison/Tyler |
| William Henry Harrison Whig | Martin Van Buren Democratic | James G. Birney Liberty | Margin | State Total | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State | electoral votes | # | % | electoral votes | # | % | electoral votes | # | % | electoral votes | # | % | # | |||||
| Alabama | 7 | 0001361828,515 | 45.62 | - | 0004866933,996 | 54.38 | 7 | no ballots | -5,481 | -8.76 | 62,511 | AL | ||||||
| Arkansas | 3 | 5,160 | 43.58 | - | 6,679 | 56.42 | 3 | no ballots | -1,519 | -12.84 | 11,839 | AR | ||||||
| Connecticut | 8 | 31,598 | 55.55 | 8 | 25,281 | 44.45 | - | no ballots | 6,317 | 11.10 | 56,879 | CT | ||||||
| Delaware | 3 | 5,967 | 54.99 | 3 | 4,872 | 44.89 | - | no ballots | 1,095 | 10.10 | 10,852 | DE | ||||||
| Georgia | 11 | 40,339 | 55.78 | 11 | 31,983 | 44.22 | - | no ballots | 8,356 | 11.56 | 72,322 | GA | ||||||
| Illinois | 5 | 45,574 | 48.91 | - | 47,441 | 50.92 | 5 | 160 | 0.17 | - | -1,867 | -2.01 | 93,175 | IL | ||||
| Indiana | 9 | 65,302 | 55.86 | 9 | 51,604 | 44.14 | - | no ballots | 13,698 | 11.72 | 116,906 | IN | ||||||
| Kentucky | 15 | 58,488 | 64.20 | 15 | 32,616 | 35.80 | - | no ballots | 25,872 | 28.40 | 91,104 | KY | ||||||
| Louisiana | 5 | 11,296 | 59.73 | 5 | 7,616 | 40.27 | - | no ballots | 3,680 | 19.46 | 18,912 | LA | ||||||
| Maine | 10 | 46,612 | 50.23 | 10 | 46,190 | 49.77 | - | no ballots | 422 | 0.46 | 92,802 | ME | ||||||
| Maryland | 10 | 33,528 | 53.83 | 10 | 28,752 | 46.17 | - | no ballots | 4,776 | 7.66 | 62,280 | MD | ||||||
| Massachusetts | 14 | 72,852 | 57.44 | 14 | 52,355 | 41.28 | - | 1,618 | 1.28 | - | 20,497 | 16.16 | 126,825 | MA | ||||
| Michigan | 3 | 22,933 | 51.71 | 3 | 21,096 | 47.57 | - | 321 | 0.72 | - | 1,837 | 4.14 | 44,350 | MI | ||||
| Mississippi | 4 | 19,515 | 53.43 | 4 | 17,010 | 46.57 | - | no ballots | 2,505 | 6.86 | 36,525 | MS | ||||||
| Missouri | 4 | 22,954 | 43.37 | - | 29,969 | 56.63 | 4 | no ballots | -7,015 | -13.26 | 52,923 | MO | ||||||
| New Hampshire | 7 | 26,310 | 43.88 | - | 32,774 | 54.66 | 7 | 872 | 1.45 | - | -6,464 | -10.78 | 59,956 | NH | ||||
| New Jersey | 8 | 33,351 | 51.74 | 8 | 31,034 | 48.15 | - | 69 | 0.11 | - | 2,317 | 3.59 | 64,454 | NJ | ||||
| New York | 42 | 226,001 | 51.18 | 42 | 212,733 | 48.18 | - | 2,809 | 0.64 | - | 13,268 | 3.00 | 441,543 | NY | ||||
| North Carolina | 15 | 46,567 | 57.68 | 15 | 34,168 | 42.32 | - | no ballots | 12,399 | 15.36 | 80,735 | NC | ||||||
| Ohio | 21 | 148,157 | 54.10 | 21 | 124,782 | 45.57 | - | 903 | 0.33 | - | 23,375 | 8.53 | 273,842 | OH | ||||
| Pennsylvania | 30 | 144,010 | 50.00 | 30 | 143,676 | 49.88 | - | 340 | 0.12 | - | 334 | 0.12 | 288,026 | PA | ||||
| Rhode Island | 4 | 5,278 | 61.22 | 4 | 3,301 | 38.29 | - | 42 | 0.49 | - | 1,977 | 22.93 | 8,621 | RI | ||||
| South Carolina | 11 | no popular vote | no popular vote | 11 | no popular vote | - | - | - | SC | |||||||||
| Tennessee | 15 | 60,194 | 55.66 | 15 | 47,951 | 44.34 | - | no ballots | 12,243 | 11.32 | 108,145 | TN | ||||||
| Vermont | 7 | 32,445 | 63.90 | 7 | 18,009 | 35.47 | - | 319 | 0.63 | - | 14,436 | 28.43 | 50,773 | VT | ||||
| Virginia | 23 | 42,639 | 49.35 | - | 43,757 | 50.65 | 23 | no ballots | -1,120 | -1.30 | 86,394 | VA | ||||||
| TOTALS: | 294 | 1,275,585 | 52.87 | 234 | 1,129,645 | 46.82 | 60 | 7,453 | 0.31 | - | 145,938 | 6.05 | 2,412,694 | US | ||||
| TO WIN: | 148 | |||||||||||||||||
States where the margin of victory was under 1%:
States where the margin of victory was under 5%:
States where the margin of victory was under 10%:
| Method of choosing electors | State(s) |
|---|---|
| Each Elector appointed by state legislature | South Carolina |
| State's electors chosen as general ticket by plurality of voters statewide | The other 25 |
- Rockabye, baby, Daddy's a Whig
- When he comes home, hard cider he'll swig
- When he has swug
- He'll fall in a stu
- And down will come Tyler and Tippecanoe.
- Rockabye, baby, when you awake
- You will discover Tip is a fake.
- Far from the battle, war cry and drum
- He sits in his cabin a'drinking bad rum.
- Rockabye, baby, never you cry
- You need not fear of Tip and his Ty.
- What they would ruin, Van Buren will fix.
- Van's a magician, they are but tricks.
![Cover of Boston Harrison Club's Harrison Melodies, 1840[13]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3a1840_Boston_Harrison_Club.png)
In the 1997 filmAmistad, Van Buren (played byNigel Hawthorne) is seen campaigning for re-election. These scenes have been criticized for their historical inaccuracy.[14]
State and district results of the1840 United States presidential election | ||
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