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.