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For most of its history, Virginia hasn’t been a swing state.
Whether we are this year is a matter of some dispute. Ultimately voters will decide that.
There have been a few times, though, when the presidential vote in Virginia was close — very close.
Here are the six closest presidential elections in Virginia. Five is a more conventional number, but there’s a great quote that can be used with the sixth one, so we have six.
1860: John Bell carries Virginia by 0.1%
Our closest presidential election was our most controversial — and consequential. My middle school Virginia history book devoted only a paragraph to that election and nearly two chapters to its aftermath — secession and the Civil War. I, and others of my generation who went to Virginia’s public schools, were instructed that when Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, “many Southerners believed they could protect their rights only by having their states withdraw from the Union” and that Virginians went to war to “defend their rights.” There was only scant reference to how those rights were interpreted as the right to own fellow human beings.
Let’s rewind to that 1860 election, a wild affair that saw four different candidates win electoral votes. This was only the second presidential election that the 6-year-old Republican Party had contested. John Underwood, a lawyer and long-time abolitionist from Clarke County, was an early Republican activist in Virginia. He and Archibald Campbell, publisher of the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, pushed to have the Republican national convention that year in Wheeling, which was then part of a Virginia that went all the way to the Ohio River. Republicans chose Chicago instead, a choice that had ramifications of its own because that home-field advantage boosted Lincoln over party favorite William Seward.
Democrats, unable to resolve their differences over slavery, split: Northern Democrats nominated Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Southern Democrats nominated Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky. A group of Southern Whigs (a party that had withered away) who favored slavery but opposed secession formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated former Tennessee Sen. John Bell. Breckenridge represented the pro-slavery South; Douglas wanted to let states decide the matter. Bell and the Constitutional Unionists adopted a platform that didn’t mention slavery at all.
Fearing that a split vote would lead to a Lincoln victory, former Mississippi Sen. Jefferson Davis tried to persuade Douglas, Breckenridge and Bell to drop out and unite behind an unnamed compromise candidate. Breckenridge and Bell agreed; Douglas did not. The four-way race continued. Both Lincoln and Douglas were unpopular in the South. Breckenridge thought he had a chance to win if he could minimize the Bell vote and sweep the South as well as some border states. If he couldn’t win an electoral majority, he felt he could win a vote in the House of Representatives. That meant the contest in the South was really a battle between Breckenridge and Bell, with Douglas an afterthought — and Lincoln not even on the ballot.
In the Deep South, Breckenridge prevailed. In border states, though, Bell ran stronger. The electoral map in Virginia is a hodgepodge. Breckenridge’s support was very inconsistent. It ranged from 93% in Calhoun County (now in West Virginia) to just 5.64% in Augusta County. Bell never polled that high; he also never polled that low. Douglas was also wildly inconsistent, taking no votes whatsoever in six counties: Gloucester, Mathews, Russell and Tazewell, plus two in the future West Virginia. However, he ran strong in the Shenandoah Valley, topping out at 46.48% in Rockingham County.
In the end, Bell eked out a narrow victory in Virginia, one of just three states he carried (Kentucky and Tennessee were the others). The whole Breckenridge-Bell contest for the South didn’t really matter because Lincoln stomped Douglas everywhere else.
Bell: 74,481, 44.63%
Breckenridge: 74,325, 44.54%
Douglas: 16,198, 9.71%
Lincoln: 1,887, 1.13%
Virtually all of Lincoln’s votes came from the Wheeling area. You know what happened next.
1888: Grover Cleveland carries Virginia by 0.53%
After Reconstruction, Republicans weren’t competitive in Virginia for a long, long time. The election of 1888 was an exception, with Republican Benjamin Harrison coming within a whisker — and he was one of those bearded gentlemen who ascended to the Oval Office — in many states in the upper South.
One of those was Virginia.
Grover Cleveland was the incumbent, the first Democrat elected since the Civil War. The main issue in 1888 was tariff policy. Cleveland argued that high tariffs hurt consumers because importers simply passed on the costs to consumers. Harrison argued that high tariffs protected American businesses and American jobs. You’ll notice that issue hasn’t gone away and is being debated this year, as well. Inflation also hurt Cleveland; so did a lackluster campaign while Republicans had a well-organized effort.
In Virginia, Cleveland’s best showing was 75.24% in Craig County. Harrison’s best was 73.49% in James City County. In the end, the final results in the state:
Cleveland: 152,004, 49.99%
Harrison: 150,399, 49.46%
Clinton Fisk, Prohibition Party: 1,684, 0.55%
The 1888 election was unusual nationally in that Cleveland won the popular vote, narrowly, but lost the electoral vote to Harrison. It was noteworthy in Virginia in another way: The election came after the high water mark for the Readjuster Party, a post-war coalition of small farmers and newly freed slaves that evolved into the Republican Party in Virginia. The Readjusters were the civil rights party of their era. They also prompted a backlash that saw conservative Democrats take power in the state. The Readjusters lost control of the General Assembly in 1883 and the governorship in 1885. Come the 1888 presidential election, their power was waning but many of their laws were still in place — so a record 304,087 Virginians voted in the presidential election. Once Democrats started passing laws to restrict who could vote, the electorate began shrinking, with the most dramatic shrinkage coming after a rewrite of the state constitution in 1902. Even with a growing population, and the potential voter pool doubling when women were granted the right to vote, it would be 40 years before that many Virginians again went to the polls in a presidential race. That year was 1928.
1872: Ulysses Grant carries Virginia by 0.98%
This election was a strange affair all around. Grant was running for reelection, and Democrats were still so weakened in the aftermath of the Civil War that they didn’t have a candidate. Instead, they nominated the same candidate put up by the newly formed Liberal Republican Party, a group of dissident Republicans. They had coalesced around New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley of “go west, young man” fame. Grant won easily nationwide.
For Virginia, this was the first presidential election since the state had been readmitted to the Union. Technically, Reconstruction was over in Virginia, but Republicans remained a significant force, with a Republican governor. Curiously, Grant ran strongest in the eastern part of the state, which in later years would become the bastion of a conservative Democratic Party, while Greeley ran best in the western part of the state, where Republicans would later live on during years of Democratic dominance. This was also the last time a Republican would carry Virginia in a presidential election until Herbert Hoover, who wasn’t even born yet, did it in 1928.
Grant: 93,463, 50.47%
Greeley: 91,647, 49.49%
Greeley died a month after the election, before the Electoral College formally met.
1840: Martin Van Buren carries Virginia by 1.3%
President Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, was seeking reelection. It wasn’t a good year to be an incumbent. The year after Van Buren had taken office, the Panic of 1837 hit, and the country was still feeling the economic aftermath of a run of bank failures. Van Buren also had an image problem: Although he came from a humble background, opponents were able to characterize him as what today we’d call an “out-of-touch elitist.” Four years before, the Whig Party had appeared on the scene as the main opposition to the Democrats but was so disorganized that three different Whigs ran. This year, Whigs had just one: William Henry Harrison, who had achieved fame as a war hero during the War of 1812. He was also 67, which was considered ancient at the time. Democrats tried to ridicule Harrison as an old man who would rather “sit in his log cabin drinking hard cider.” Whigs seized on that and turned it into an attribute, much the way that Republicans in our era turned Hillary Clinton’s reference to “deplorables” into a rallying cry. Although Harrison came from a wealthy family in Virginia and lived well in retirement in Ohio, his political operatives made voters see him as a hardscrabble westerner.
The result was a campaign that modern political spin masters would love: Van Buren, the son of immigrants, was portrayed as an aristocrat, while Harrison, who came from the landed gentry in Virginia’s Charles City County, was presented as the true man of the people. This was the year of the “log cabin campaign” where Whigs chanted “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” referring to Harrison’s famous military victory and his running mate.
Harrison won, narrowly in the popular vote but by a wide margin in the electoral vote. Virginia was one of the few states that stuck with Van Buren, even though both Harrison and John Tyler were native Virginians. It was close, though:
Van Buren: 43,757, 50.65%
Harrison: 42,637, 49.35%
Fun fact: Van Buren was the first president who was born after the American Revolution — in 1782, meaning he was the first who hadn’t been born as a British subject.
Another fun fact: He’s still our only president for whom English was his second language. He grew up in a family that spoke Dutch.
A not-so-fun fact: Harrison died about a month after taking office, making him the first president to die in office.
1976: Gerald Ford carries Virginia by 1.33%
At last, a modern election! From 1876 onward, Virginia had been part of the Solid South for Democrats with just the Herbert Hoover exception in 1928, until Dwight Eisenhower wrenched it into the Republican column in 1952. That’s where it stayed until 2008, with just the Lyndon Johnson exception in 1964.
In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter inspired Southern pride and carried every Southern state except one: Virginia.
The margin was close, but Republicans managed to hold on. The electoral map of 1976 shows how much things have changed. Fairfax County was still a Republican county then; much of Southwest Virginia was in the Democratic column. Ford’s two best counties were Henrico (65.8%) and Chesterfield (65.5%); both now are Democratic bastions as suburbs have realigned, particularly in the Trump era. Carter’s best county was Charles City County (74.8%), which remains Democratic, but he also took 66% in Craig County, which now is an 80% Republican county, as many rural areas have realigned in the opposite direction. A few things remain the same, though: The Shenandoah Valley was Republican then as it is now (with a few urban exceptions).
Ford: 836,554, 49.3%
Carter: 813,896, 48.0%
Peter Camejo, Socialist Workers: 17,802, 1.0%
John Anderson, American Party: 16,686, 1.0%
Lyndon LaRouche, U.S. Labor Party: 7,508, 0.4%
Roger McBride: 4,648, 0.3%
Fun fact: McBride, the Libertarian candidate, was from Virginia. Four years before, he’d been treasurer of the Virginia Republican Party and was an elector for Richard Nixon but became a “faithless elector” by voting for the Libertarian nominee — the only time a Libertarian has won an electoral vote and the first time a woman won an electoral vote (the Libertarian nominee for vice president was Tonie Nathan). Come 1976, Libertarians rewarded McBride with their presidential nomination. He made the ballot in 32 states and took 0.21% of the vote nationally.
1848: Lewis Cass carries Virginia by 1.6%
This election is remembered as … well, honestly, it’s not remembered for very much, although perhaps it should be. The Democratic incumbent, James Polk, was retiring after a single term. He’d been popular and, under him, the nation had formalized its acquisition of Western lands won by the just-concluded Mexican War, and then added the Oregon Territory through a treaty with Great Britain. Democrats should have won the election on what today we’d call “the fundamentals” — peace and prosperity — but didn’t. The reasons they didn’t foreshadow many troubles to come.
Former President Martin Van Buren wanted back in, but he’d become an anti-slavery advocate, at a time when much of his party depended on Southern support. When Democrats endorsed a platform calling for voters in newly acquired territories to decide whether to allow slavery, Van Buren bolted and eventually became the candidate of the newly formed Free Soil Party. Instead, Democrats turned to Michigan Sen. Lewis Cass. Newspaper publisher Horace Greeley did not think much of Cass. He criticized Cass as a man “whose life has been spent in grasping greedily after vast tracts of land, buying up large estates round Detroit, &c. and selling them out in small town lots, huckster fashion, at immense profits to tradesman and immigrants.” (I believe the modern term for this is “successful real estate developer.”) That’s not the worst thing Greeley had to say about Cass. This was: He ridiculed Cass as “pot-bellied, mutton-headed, cucumber-soled,” whatever that last insult means but it’s too good not to use.
The Whig Party eventually disbanded because it had no clear principles on slavery or much of anything else. It did believe in winning, though, and nominated Zachary Taylor, whose political views were even more unknown but who had been a Mexican War hero. Never mind that one thing Whigs had agreed on was their opposition to that war; nominating a war hero seemed a good idea to them. Politically, it was.
Taylor, who was born in Orange County in Virginia but grew up in Kentucky, rode to victory. Nationally, he took 47.3% of the vote, while Cass took 42.5% and Van Buren 10.1%. The South had not yet solidified behind a single party (one of the things that led to the Civil War) and split between Whigs and Democrats. Virginia went Whig.
Cass: 46,739, 50.80%
Taylor: 45,265, 49.20%
Fun fact, although not so fun for the Whigs: Polk, the outgoing president, met with Taylor and found him “without political information” and “wholly unqualified for the station” of president. Once in office, Taylor passed over many key Whigs for appointments and wound up opposing many of the things they supported. Taylor made enemies on both sides of the aisle — Democrats had no reason to like him because he was a Whig, but Whigs considered him disloyal to the party. He clashed repeatedly with government officials, and Congress started to ignore him. The only thing that saved him from greater political troubles was death. He died in office, just as the previous Whig president, Harrison, had done. That made Millard Fillmore president. Meanwhile, the issues festering in the country — over slavery, primarily — continued to grow until civil war broke out.
As for Cass, he stayed in politics. In the late 1850s, President James Buchanan was stuck on who to name as secretary of state. He turned to Cass as a compromise choice. By then, Cass was in his late 70s and considered too old for the position, but he eagerly accepted the job. As the secession crisis loomed after Lincoln’s election in 1860, Cass resigned in protest — he believed that Buchanan should have been doing more to prevent secession.
If you’re curious, only two of these elections — 1860 and 1888 — would have qualified for a recount under our current laws, and only one of them (1860) was close enough that the government would have paid for it. And none of these elections would have gone the other way nationally if Virginia had flipped.