In 1824, I feel sorry for Henry Clay. DE and NY did not have a popular vote for handing out electoral votes, and had one of the votes given to Crawford in each of those states gone to Clay instead, and had a faithless elector in MD not voted for Crawford despite him getting only 10% of the popular vote in the state (with Adams and Jackson each getting around 44%), Clay would have finished third in EVs and been eligible to be in the running for election by the House, where Clay would have almost certainly been elected president by his colleagues. Clay ran for president two other times, 1832 and 1844, and in 1844 he would have been elected over Polk had he been able to carry NY instead of losing it by just 1.05% (with Liberty Party candidate James Birney playing spoiler by getting 3.25% in the state).
I do not feel sorry at all for Samuel Tilden, even though he was from what I’ve read a good man. Do you think that it’s a coincidence that the only three ex-Confederate states whose state governmentd did not actively prevent blacks from voting (because they still had Reconstruction governments) were the only three Southern states that Hayes was able to carry? Jim Crow made sure that Tilden got huge margins in every other state in the Deep South. And in those three states, SC, LA and FL, Tilden’s claim that he had narrowly won the popular vote ignored the fact that in many precincts across those states blacks were systematically prevented from voting by the KKK (with the local government pointedly looking the other way) or by the local government itself; since it would have been illegitimate for the state government to estimate how many votes blacks would have cast in those precincts, much less to assume how they would have voted (although in the Deep South in 1876 blacks voted as heavily Republican as they voted Democrat in 2008), the state government decided to throw out all votes cast in the precincts in which free elections had not been held, which resulted in Hayes carrying all three ststes and earning the states’ electoral votes. That the Demcrats in the national Electoral Commission voted to hand such EV’s to Tilden fir partisan, not justice, reasons is clear from the fact that every Democrat on the Electoral Commission also voted to give Tilden one elector from Oregon (a state carried by Hayed by an unambiguous margin) because one of the Hayes electors on the ballot was a Postmaster General (whom Democrats claimed was an “Officer of the United States ineligible to serve as a presidential elector) and when he resigned in favor of an alternate Hayes elector Oregon’s Democrat governor decided ultra vires to declare that a Tilden elector should replace him. It would have been a terrible injustice for Tilden to have been declared the winner over Hayes.
And in 1916, the only reason why Wilson won the popular vote over Hughes was because Jim Crow prevented blacks from voting in the Deep South and Wilson thus got vote percentages such as 76% in AL, 69% in FL, 80% in GA, 77% in TX, 86% in LA, 93% in MS and 97% in SC. As for the Electoral College, Hughes would have won it despite getting zero EVs in the South had he been able ti carry CA (as you mentioned), where he lost by only 0.38%. Someone posted recently here on FR that California GOP Senator Hiram Johnson, who had been TR’s runningmate in the 1912 election, had refused to endorse (or at least campaign for) Hughes, and that had he done so Hughes wouldhave certainly carried the state (and thus the presidency). Alas, we were stuck with virulently racist “liberal fascist” president for four more years.
I once wrote a paper on Henry Clay, and for a while was obsessed with him. But while I despise Jackson, I came to strongly dislike Clay for his lack of courage in confronting slavery. This, more than anything else, kept him out of the presidency.
Of course, voter suppression was an issue for decades. Would Cleveland ever have won the popular vote if southern blacks could vote?
I’ve read that about Hiram Johnson, and that Hughes didn’t go out of his way to court him either. I love (or in his case hate) how such relatively minor event altered the course of history.
I haven’t definitively decided who’d I’d have voted for in every 19th century election but I’ve often wondered what kind of President Clay would have made.