The Friday Quiz: Pre-abdication Presidential Puzzle
Desperately packing up for a week of ultraviolet radiation and intra-family squabbling as all of the Wombat's various relations attempt to share a house on the Jersey shore for a week…so there will be no posts here until after Labor Day. But as rushed as this pre-holiday is, I have not neglected those of you not already in some remote undisclosed location. Here’s another election-season noodle-boiler:
In only one historical case in U.S. presidential elections did the winner of the election come in second in the electoral total. Who was the President elected under these circumstances? Who was the electoral vote leader? Bonus: name the winner and loser (this time with straight electoral totals) of the following Presidential election.
First correct answer to each part to comments wins a pair of tickets to the upcoming off-off-off-Broadway musical production of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. No Googling or rigging the electoral vote in November. One guess at each part per comment, but comment as often as you can stomach it. See you in September.
Comments
Bwuh?
I'm not sure what I'm missing here, but Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and came in second in the electoral total. Maybe you aren't counting that because SCOTUS had to decide that the Florida election would stand without a recount, but it's hard to argue that the electors that went to Washington voted for George Bush.
In that case, in the next election, Bush defeated Kerry.
Samuel Tilden also won the popular vote, but Rutherford B. Hayes was made president. I seem to recall some weird compromise occurring there, but I also think there has never been an electoral tie. So that'd a second case if I'm not wrong about an electoral tie.
The election after that James Garfield beat someone. Estes Kefauver?
Posted by: boxjam![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.wombatfile.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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August 22, 2008 12:11 PM
Just gonna keep on guessing John Quincy Adams til it's right.
So:
JQ Adams defeats Andy Jackson.
Next election, reverse that.
Posted by: hackly_fracture![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.wombatfile.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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August 22, 2008 12:57 PM
Hackly wins the electoral vote, the popular vote, and the Secret Wombat Masonic Ballot. He is this week's President of the Quiz.
The election years were, respectively, 1824 and 1828. In 1824 Jackson won a plurality, but not a majority, of the electoral vote (it was a 4-way split with Jackson, Adams, Henry Clay and someone else) -- so the vote went to the House of Representatives, which gave it to JQA and hence today's honors to Senator Fracture.
(In '28, Jackson gathered his forces and pretty clearly routed Adams).
Posted by: BT![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.wombatfile.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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August 22, 2008 02:15 PM