No one reaches required number of electoral votes in the election of 1860.

Who wins election of 1860 in the House?


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No one reaches required number of electoral votes in the election of 1860. Election gets thrown to the House, who wins and what ramifications does this have?
 
Your poll doesn't have the option of a deadlock in the House which will make the vice-president chosen by the Senate president. That would almost certainly be Breckinridge's running mate Lane.

(BTW, the Republicans called attention to that possibility in the campaign, saying the choice was "Lincoln or Lane." https://books.google.com/books?id=2PQqZzyw4uAC&pg=PA111 Lane was the sort of "doughface" antislavery northerners hated even more than they hated proslavery southerners.)
 
Some further thoughts:

(1) It won't be Douglas: "Douglas had often declared that he would not be a candidate if the election were taken to the House, and he said so again in Mobile. He would not accept the presidency unless he were chosen by the people. He now added, 'I scorn to accept the Presidency as a minority candidate.' But Douglas had long known that the question would not arise."
https://books.google.com/books?id=pCzhaQTh5SEC&pg=PA802

Even though Douglas knew the occasion was very unlikely to arise, he may have been sincere in saying he wouldn't be a candidate in the House even in the unlikely event that he had an opportunity to do so. Remember that for Democrats of his generation, election by the House brought to mind the "corrupt bargain" that had defeated Jackson. Indeed, while Douglas was disappointed by his showing in the Electoral College, he was actually relieved that Lincoln got a clear majority of electoral votes, so that the race would not go into the House. https://books.google.com/books?id=pCzhaQTh5SEC&pg=PA803

(2) On why I think Breckinridge has a good chance if the race goes into the House, I'll repeat what I said in a recent post:

Remember that the voting is on a one-delegation, one-vote basis--which gave the South disproportionate weight. The breakdown of the delegations was as follows: Fifteen were controlled by Republicans. Thirteen were controlled by Breckinridge Democrats (eleven slave states plus California and Oregon). One state--Illinois--was controlled by Douglas Democrats. Bell supporters controlled one state (Tennessee). Three states (Kentucky, Maryland, and North Carolina) were equally divided between Breckinridge Democrats and Bell supporters. (Bell's supporters used a variety of party names--American, Oppositionists, Constitutional Unionists, etc. A few may even still have called themselves Whigs...) Breckinridge can win if he gets one "American" each in KY, MD and NC and three in TN. I think it quite possible that he can do so. The Americans/Oppositionists were after all Southerners, and if it was clear that Bell could not win, they would likely prefer Breckinridge to a "black Republican." (Henry Winter Davis would be an obvious exception.) True, the Americans/Oppositionists might just keep the House deadlocked by continuing to vote for Bell. But that would be rather pointless, because it would just mean the vice-president chosen by the Senate would become president--and that would certainly be Breckinridge's running mate Lane, the Oregon "doughface."

Moreover, some slave-state moderates (whether Bell or Douglas supporters) might be willing to vote for Breckinridge because he wasn't as extreme as some other members of the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic party. For example, unlike President Buchanan, he supported Douglas against Lincoln in the 1858 Illinois Senate race; despite his disagreements with Douglas over Lecompton and the Freeport Doctrine, he thought Douglas the clearly preferable candidate. Again, in 1860 he professed his devotion to the Union (though of course he meant a Union where slavery's "rights" as defined by southerners, were protected) as a true fire-eater would not. Breckinridge had the support of the Rhetts and the Yanceys, but was not really one of them.

(3) I doubt that Lincoln could win in the House, but I'll repeat an old post on why it is just possible:

It's not very likely the 1860 election would *go* into the House--at least not with Lincoln as the Republican candidate--but it seems widely assumed that if it did, he couldn't win there. After all, the Republicans were two delegations short of a majority. But here is how the gossiping friend of Alexander Stephens, J. Henley Smith, thought that Lincoln could indeed could win in the House:

"Congressman Isaac N. Morris, a Douglas Democrat from Illinois, had avowed that he would vote for none but Douglas. Smith believed that Morris would eventually cast his lot with the Republicans. Also Congressman Lansing Stout of Oregon occupied a precarious seat, which was being contested by the Republicans. Inasmuch as they had organized the House, if it became necessary they would press the contest against Stout, unseat him, and win the Oregon vote and the election." Ollinger Crenshaw, *The Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), pp. 68-69.

(Stout had defeated David Logan--the candidate of the Republicans and informally supported by the Douglas Democrats--by only sixteen votes out of more than eleven thousand cast in 1859!
http://books.google.com/books?id=n8aMn4CxknsC&pg=PA281 Logan--who considered himself a Whig long after the party dwindled into national insignificance--had until recently been a strong critic of "Black Republicans." But once the divisions in the Democratic camp gave him a chance to win, he readily accepted the Republican nomination.)

Unseating Stout would, however, outrage many non-Republicans (Douglas, Bell, and Breckinridge supporters) who in OTL supported Lincoln and the war effort after Fort Sumter. They felt that the South had the duty to accept the election of Lincoln because he had won fair and square. If instead he wins with such dubious methods, he has not only practically the entire South against him but a huge number of Northerners as well. Moreover, Oregon alone will not elect Lincoln. It only gets him up to sixteen delegations, still one short of a majority. The Republicans also need to get at least one Douglas Democrat from Illinois--whether Morris or someone else--to vote for Lincoln, and unseating Stout would if anything make this less likely. (It's not enough for Morris to adhere to his vow to vote for nobody but Douglas. If Morris merely abstains, the delegation is tied, so Lincoln still does not win its vote.) Anyway, I am not even sure the Republicans, who only barely controlled the House, had the votes to unseat Stout.

Stout himself eventually became a Republican--could he be persuaded to vote for Lincoln in OTL? The April 1860 Lane-dominated Oregon Democratic convention had refused to consider renominating Stout.
http://books.google.com/books?id=JtxAAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA168 On the one hand, this meant that any Republican threat to unseat him would probably not move his vote, since he was a lame duck anyway. Yet on the other hand, if he had enough resentment toward his old ally Lane for not supporting his renomination, *that* just might lead him to vote for Lincoln. (Yet after his failure to be renominated, Stout attended the Charleston Convention and telegraphed Lane, then in Washington, for instructions. https://books.google.com/books?id=XSWiAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA176 So he still seems to have been a loyal Lane Democrat at this time.)

(4) As for Bell, I like the idea--but he only has a chance if the Republicans, seeing that Lincoln has no chance in the House, vote en masse for Bell on the theory that he was a lesser evil than Breckinridge or Lane. There is a case for that--Bell, though a slaveholder, was the only southern senator who voted against both the Kansas-Nebraska bill and the Lecompton Constitution. But in the first place, the Republicans alone could not elect Bell, and I wonder whether the southern American/Oppositionists will still vote for Bell if it is evident that he will be elected mainly by "black Republican" votes. Second, I doubt the Republicans could muster the required unanimity to give Bell a chance. Some will stubbornly oppose voting for any non-Republican; others will remember that Bell had supported the nativist Fillmore in 1856...

In conclusion, I just want to reiterate that it's not very likely the race will go into the House unless the Republicans nominate a weaker candidate than Lincoln. Lincoln could lose CA, OR, IL, and the four electoral votes he received in NJ--and he would still have more than enough votes to win in the Electoral College. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860 To have the race in the House, you have to have Lincoln lose a state like NY, which he won by 7.4 points in OTL, or IN which he won by 8.7. Not impossible--but unlikely.
 
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