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1800 United States presidential election
Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied at 73 electoral votes each, and the Federalist-controlled House needed 36 ballots, ending on February 17, 1801, to choose Jefferson. The deadlock led to the Twelfth Amendment, which has electors vote separately for president and vice president.
The deeper shift was partisan. National power passed from John Adams's Federalists to Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, and the Federalists never again claimed the presidency, largely disappearing during James Monroe's time in office. For anyone tracing realignment, this is the starting point: the first real test of whether one organized party would hand the government to another.
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1828 United States presidential election
Andrew Jackson won 56 percent of the vote and beat John Quincy Adams 178 electoral votes to 83, reversing the 1824 contest that Jackson insisted a "corrupt bargain" had taken from him.
The realignment lies in the coalition behind him. Jackson's backers, including the old Crawford Republicans that Martin Van Buren of New York shepherded and the supporters of John C. Calhoun, became the party soon known as the Democrats, while Adams led the National Republicans. The one-party calm of the previous decade gave way to two organized camps competing for a mass electorate. Read this entry to see where the Democratic Party's first coalition came from.
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1860 United States presidential election
Abraham Lincoln won about 40 percent of the popular vote and 180 electoral votes in a four-way race, and he did it without a single Southern state. The Democrats had split between Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, and John Bell's Constitutional Union ticket ran as well.
The result made the young Republican Party, a Northern coalition built on opposing slavery's spread into the territories, the governing party. South Carolina declared secession little more than a month later. Counting Lincoln's 1864 National Union ticket as Republican, the party won fourteen of the eighteen presidential elections from 1860 through 1928, losing only to Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, so the sectional map drawn by this vote outlasted the war itself.
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1896 United States presidential election
William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan 271 electoral votes to 176 in a campaign fought over money itself. Bryan, running for both the Democrats and the Populists, wanted free silver; McKinley stood for the gold standard and the tariff.
McKinley's coalition of businessmen, professionals, skilled factory workers and prosperous farmers swept the Northeast, Upper Midwest and Pacific Coast, while Bryan held the South, the rural Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states. Mark Hanna's Republican campaign spent about $3.5 million, roughly five times Bryan's total. Republicans then held the White House for sixteen years, and Bryan's outsider wing shaped the Democrats well into the next century.
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1928 United States presidential election
Herbert Hoover beat Al Smith 444 electoral votes to 87, which on the totals looks like a routine Republican year. The realignment sits beneath them. Smith, the Catholic, anti-Prohibition governor of New York and the first Catholic nominated by a major party, lost Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, a rare Republican break into the old Confederacy. Yet the Democrats carried most of the nation's large cities for the first time.
V.O. Key argued that 1928 was a critical election, at least in the New England towns he studied, but historians still disagree over whether it began a realignment or only foreshadowed one, making this the most debated entry here. Read it with 1932, when that urban vote joined a national majority.
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1932 United States presidential election
Franklin D. Roosevelt took 57 percent of the popular vote, 472 electoral votes and 42 of the 48 states as voters turned on Herbert Hoover over the Depression. Roosevelt called for "a new deal for the American people" without yet spelling out the programs that would carry the name.
The lasting change was the coalition: Southern Protestants, Catholic and Jewish voters in Northern cities, union members and Black voters came together behind the Democrats as the New Deal took shape. Gains in the 1934 midterms and Roosevelt's 1936 landslide confirmed the Democrats as the majority party for a generation. If you read only one entry on this list, this is the textbook case of a realigning election.
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1964 United States presidential election
Lyndon Johnson won 61.1 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes, carrying 44 states and the District of Columbia. On its face it was a Democratic landslide, and it led to Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty.
The map tells a second story. Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, won only his native Arizona and five states of the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. States long loyal to the Democrats had broken for a Republican who opposed the civil rights bill, and the party's conservative wing found the message it would carry for decades. Both parties' later coalitions are already visible in this one result.
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1968 United States presidential election
Richard Nixon won 301 electoral votes to Hubert Humphrey's 191, with George Wallace's segregationist American Independent campaign taking 46, and Nixon's popular margin over Humphrey was under one percentage point. It came in a year of assassinations, riots and violent clashes at the Democratic convention, and Nixon promised to restore "law and order."
Its claim to realignment, which some historians make, is that it broke the New Deal coalition in presidential voting. Many Southern Democrats defected, Wallace hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans, and Republicans won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 through 1988, losing only in 1976. Democrats kept both houses of Congress, so the shift was not total.
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1980 United States presidential election
Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter 489 electoral votes to 49 and 51 percent to 41 in the popular vote, with John Anderson's independent run drawing under 7 percent. In the same election Republicans won control of the Senate for the first time in 28 years.
The voters who moved are why it belongs here. Reagan made inroads among working-class Democrats and union families and did well across the South, which had been Carter's base. Added to the earlier drift of the South, those voters gave Republicans a conservative coalition that framed the rest of the century's politics, popularly called the Reagan Revolution. Read it with 1964 and 1968 to see one long realignment finish.
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