5 times Presidential Election winner lost the popular vote

When presidents are elected, we consider it the will of the people.
But sometimes, that isn’t the case. Sometimes the person elected doesn’t receive the most votes, but still wins the Electoral College.
Here’s a look at times when the popular and electoral votes didn’t match.
In the United States, the winner of the presidential race is determined by the Electoral College.
Sign-up for Your Vote: Text with the USA TODAY elections team.
According to the National Archives, the Electoral College was a compromise between electing a president by Congress and popular vote.
The Electoral College has 538 electors – a majority of 270 electoral votes is needed to become president. Each state has a number of electors. The number is determined by taking the number of senators a state has (2) and adding one for each member in the House of Representatives.
✅ Voters Guide: Get to know the candidates, where to vote early and more
To put it simply, the candidate who wins the state, except for Nebraska and Maine, wins all the electoral votes for the state. In Maine and Nebraska, they allocate two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district.
The United States has held 58 presidential elections and for the most part, the results matched with the popular vote. Here’s a look at the five elections that the popular vote winner didn’t enter the White House.
There were four candidates – Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and Henry Clay – on the presidential ballot and all were in the Democratic-Republican party. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but he didn’t win a majority of the Electoral College votes. While Jackson had a plurality of electoral votes, he fell 32 electoral votes short.
The vote went to the House of Representatives. The top three candidates were advanced to the House, eliminating Clay, who was also speaker of the House. According to History.com, Clay allegedly used his influence as speaker to get Adams elected. Clay then became Adams’ secretary of state. The results infuriated Jackson, who accused his opponents of stealing the election.
Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but Congress needed to solve a near constitutional crisis.
Tilden won 184 Electoral votes while Hayes secured 165, but Tilden was still one vote short of a majority. However, there were 20 electoral votes in dispute, according to History.com.
Republicans objected to results from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Both candidates claimed victory in the states. Since the Constitution didn’t have a solution for this situation, Congress created a bipartisan Federal Electoral Commission composed of House representatives, senators and Supreme Court justices.
The commission gave the votes to Hayes, who won 185-184. According to History.com, historians believe the Democrats, whose stronghold was the South, agreed to let Hayes be president in return for ending Reconstruction.
In a rather nasty contest between Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison, the 1888 race included accusations of votes being sold to the highest bidder and Black votes being suppressed in the South. Cleveland won the popular vote by more than 90,000 votes by sweeping the Southern states. Harrison won the North and Western states to pull out a 233-168 Electoral College victory.
Democratic nominee and Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote over Republican candidate George Bush by 500,000-plus votes, but Gore was stuck on 266 electoral votes with one state in play – Florida. After a recount, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Bush as the winner by 537 votes. The Gore campaign sued claiming all the votes hadn’t been counted because of issues such as pregnant chads or dimpled chads (punch votes where the punch didn’t go all the way through) and hanging chads (votes that didn’t read because the punch left part of the card dangling.
The Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, but Bush took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Bush’s favor. Bush won the election 271-266.
Democratic candidate and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over celebrity real estate mogul Donald Trump by 2.8 million votes. Clinton did well in large cities and populous states like New York and California, but the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin collapsed on election night.
Trump swept the battleground states, claiming an Electoral College victory of 304-227.