Throwback Thursday: Remembering the Election of a Hoosier President

If you haven’t been to the Benjamin Harrison Home in downtown Indianapolis, you should check it out. This is where Harrison lived when he won the 1888 election in a year that proved to be quite monumental for the city and state. And here are some interesting facts from the Harrison Home’s November 2013 newsletter, “The Car-O-Line.”

Statistics of 1888 Election

  • Five parties were on the ballot – Republican, Democrat, Prohibition, Union Labor and American
  • Harrison actually lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland (5,538,163 to 5,443,633)
  • Here is a fun web site to learn more about this and other elections
  • The 1888 election was not the first or only time a candidate won the popular vote but lost the election. It has happened three other times in our nation’s history:
  1. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but got less than 50% of the electoral votes. John Quincy Adams became the next president when he was picked by the House of Representatives
  2. In 1876, Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost the election when Rutherford B. Hayes got 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election to George W. Bush.
  3. In the most highly contested election in modern history, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount of ballots, giving Bush the state’s 25 electoral votes for a total of 271 to Gore’s 255