1876 United States presidential election

1876 United States presidential election

← 1872 November 7, 1876 (1876-11-07) 1880 →
369 members of the Electoral College 185 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout	82.6%[1] 10.5 pp
Nominee Rutherford B. Hayes Samuel J. Tilden Party Republican Democratic Home state Ohio New York Running mate William A. Wheeler Thomas A. Hendricks Electoral vote 185 184 States carried 21 17 Popular vote 4,034,142 4,286,808 Percentage 47.9% 50.9%
Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Hayes/Wheeler, blue denotes those won by Tilden/Hendricks. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
President before election Ulysses S. Grant Republican Elected President Rutherford B. Hayes Republican via Electoral Commission

The 1876 United States presidential election was the 23rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876.

Following President Grant's decision to retire after his second term, U.S. Representative James G. Blaine emerged as frontrunner for the Republican nomination. However, Blaine was unable to win a majority at the 1876 Republican National Convention, which settled on Governor Hayes of Ohio as a compromise candidate. The 1876 Democratic National Convention nominated Governor Tilden of New York on the second ballot.

The election was among the most contentious in American history, and was only resolved by the Compromise of 1877, where Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction in exchange for recognition of his presidency. On March 2, 1877, the House and Senate confirmed Hayes as president. Tilden won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165 in the first count, with the 20 votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon disputed. To address this constitutional crisis, Congress established the Electoral Commission, which awarded all twenty votes (and thus the presidency) to Hayes in a strict party-line vote. Some Democratic representatives filibustered the commission's decision, hoping to prevent Hayes's inauguration, but their filibuster was ultimately ended by party leader Samuel J. Randall.

It was the second of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner did not win a plurality of the national popular vote, after the 1824 election. Although Tilden defeated Hayes in the official popular vote tally, the election involved substantial electoral fraud, voter intimidation by paramilitary groups, and disenfranchisement of black Republicans. The election had the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting-age population in American history, at 82.6%.^[2][3] Tilden's 50.9% is the largest share of the popular vote received by a candidate who was not elected to the presidency, marking the only presidential election in U.S. history in which the losing candidate won a majority of the vote. Tilden was also the last person to win a majority of the popular vote until William McKinley in 1896. As of 2024^[update], this marks the only presidential election in which both candidates were sitting governors.