November 8, 1864

1864 United States presidential election

Lincoln wins reelection over George B. McClellan

On a rainy election night Lincoln walked to the War Department telegraph office and read comic writings aloud during lulls in the returns.

A wartime election night

Voters in the participating United States chose presidential electors on 8 November 1864, picking the National Union ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson over the Democrats George B. McClellan and George H. Pendleton. Eleven states in rebellion did not appear in the tabulation used for the national result.

At 7 p.m., in heavy rain, Lincoln went to the War Department telegraph office to take the returns. By midnight enough had arrived for the men in the office to congratulate him, although the storm had delayed reports from his own Illinois.

Lopsided in electors, narrower in votes

The final tabulation gave Lincoln 212 electoral votes to McClellan's 21. The popular vote was closer: 2,220,846 to 1,809,445, or 55.1 against 44.9 percent.

That is a margin of 411,401 votes and 10.2 points — decisive rather than near-unanimous. Congress later excluded electoral votes claimed from Union-controlled Louisiana and Tennessee, so 212–21 is the accepted count, not a tally of every ballot cast in reconstructed areas.

Ballots from the field

Nineteen states had passed legislation letting soldiers vote in the field, by mail or on leave — the first American war with broad arrangements for deployed soldiers to vote. About 150,000 field ballots were cast, roughly 78 percent of them for Lincoln.

Whether they decided the race is a separate claim: field ballots were under six percent of all ballots cast, and their precise electoral effect remains debated. McClellan, a general running on a platform that called the war a failure, had publicly repudiated that peace plank.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 10 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The electoral votes were formally cast and counted after Election Day; November 8 is the popular election date on which the outcome became apparent.
Historical popular-vote totals vary slightly among compilations. The figures here consistently use the Library of Congress/CQ Press and American Presidency Project tabulation.
Congress later excluded electoral votes claimed from Union-controlled Louisiana and Tennessee. The familiar 212–21 result is the accepted count, not every ballot cast in reconstructed areas.