Talk:United States presidential election, 1789

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[edit] First election?

Was this the first actual U.S. presidential election? If so that should be stated. It seems to be the first on the 'other elections' list. — (unsigned contribution by 142.177.110.216 on Feb 18, 2003)

[edit] Adams

So how many votes did Adams get? Rmhermen 21:08, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Popular vote, unknown?

What does "popular vote, unknown" mean? There was no popular vote. Adam 04:03, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There was a popular vote in the election of 1788-1789. However, the results were not tabulated until the end of the twentieth century. Phil Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester MA went to the archives of the earliest states and collected the information on the popular vote for presidential elections before 1824. Washington received 38,818 votes, including 2,952 votes on anti-federalist slates of Presidential Electors in PA and MD. The results are given here: http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=59542 Chronicler3 13:35, 8 February 2006 (UTC)Chronicler3

[edit] More on the popular vote

I believe that the footnote on the popular vote misses the point. The same footnote could be used for all presidential elections until the Civil War in terms of not all states choosing Electors by popular vote or restrictions on the right to vote. For that matter, some states restricted the vote until 1964.

If the popular vote of 1789-1820 is "suspect," it should strictly be the result of incomplete or disputed results. Michael J. Dubin's recent book United States Presidential Elections 1788-1860 gives the popular vote breakdown by county for these elections. This is a key work in terms of providing this information, which four researchers have recently investigated in various states. In several cases, Dubin's information differs from that collected by Phil Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society. I have also found instances where Dubin missed some information (OH 1804 and 1808, NC 1820) or has misattributions (NC 1816). Mistakes happen in any type of work of this nature. Most of Dubin's information is sourced, but not all (contact me if you want to know more about this because he disputes it). By the way, at www.ourcapaigns.com, I have entered the sources of the vote in each state's race. To me, the question is this: how accurate is this information?

It seems to me that a more precise footnote would be something along these lines: The popular vote for this year is derived from late twentieth century research primarily by Phil Lampi and Michael J. Dubin. The vote of several states choosing Electors by popular vote is incomplete (e.g., DE, MA, VA). Although in this election many of the Electors were chosen by the legislatures, it is clear that Washington would still have been elected if a nationwide popular vote had taken place.

Just my thoughts. Chronicler3 16:34, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't terribly clear in writing the footnote. The issue I am trying to communicate is that the popular vote figures are the sums of the popular vote figures in the several states. This is problematic because some states didn't have a popular vote and because those states that did choose electors by popular vote had significant variations in the requirements for the vote; while the figures for each state might be meaningful, the variation among them means that the sums don't tell us a lot, because it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
This particular problem I am trying to describe is definitely severely curtailed in post-1824 elections: legislative choice ceases to eliminate more than one or two whole states' popular vote, and the universes of voters in the states become more homogeneous.
I hope that you get what I am trying to communicate. Any help you can give in getting this concept across would be appreciated.
— DLJessup (talk) 22:16, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Methods of selecting electors in Massachusetts

Also in MA, the legislature only chose the district Electors if no one received a majority in the popular election. Chronicler3 16:37, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Really? If you have a citation for that, please, please change the electoral college selection table to reflect that.
— DLJessup (talk) 22:02, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Map

North Carolina was not a territory. And why does Virgina include Kentucky? Cameron Nedland 17:02, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, North Carolina was not a territory, but an independent nation at election time. This is a flaw in the map which was obtained from the public domain National Atlas of the United States. Rhode Island was also independent at the time, and both should be blank in the map. Want to update the map?
Virginia includes Kentucky, because Kentucky was part of Virginia until Kentucky achieved statehood in 1792. (Maine was similarly part of Massachusetts until 1820.)
— DLJessup (talk) 18:24, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
I have updated the map myself, but I'm not exactly happy with the results: the map has become more washed out. If anyone would like to take a try and do a better job, please be my guest.
— DLJessup (talk) 18:53, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Armstrong?

The link to the Pennsylvania physican notwithstanding, I do not think we actually know who the mysterious "James Armstong" who received a single electoral vote. Somehow I doubt that an elector from Georgia would give one of his two votes to an obscure medical officer who wasn't even elected to congress until 1793. The main reason, I think, that respectable sources like Congressional Quarterly and the Political Graveyard peg him as that Pennsylvanian is that they frankly don't know who else it could be. I've seen at least one major work on presidential elections list him as from Georgia. This I believe is more likely. James Armstrong was probably a fairly unimportant local official who an elector was familiar with, an 18th century Walter Burgwyn Jones if you will. The problem is that there seem to be more than one James Armstrongs running around in late 18th century Georgia. Georgian legislative records or newspapers from the time might shed some light on the subject. If anyone has easy access to these, I would be interested to see what (if anything) they reveal about the confusion.

24.125.168.51 22:35, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

I have incorporated your above comments into the article in the form of a footnote to the electoral vote table.
— DLJessup (talk) 15:08, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
- Well for that matter, the link for John Milton connects to a politician who had not even been born in 1789. The book The First Federal Elections gives a lot of good information on the election of 1789. It included a list of all Presidential Electors. I remember that at least one of the Georgia votes was cast for one of the Electors, but I don't remember which one. Does anyone have access to that book? Chronicler3 10:29, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
According to the Political Graveyard, that John Milton was Georgia secretary of state from 1777 to 1799. I've created a stub article for him and redirected the link appropriately.
— DLJessup (talk) 18:05, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New information on James Armstrong

In the book _The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections_ [usually simplified to _First Federal Elections_], (Gordon DenBoer, ed., Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1984), James Armstrong is discussed on page 441. Armstrong (c. 1728-1800) served in the Revolution as a major. After the war, he settled in Camden County, Georgia, where he served in the state Assembly in 1787 and 1790. He was elected to the Execurive Council in 1788 and was serving on that body when the Presidential Electors met. Chronicler3 10:40, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

I have gone ahead and created James Armstrong (Georgia) as a stub biography of this individual. I have also revised this page to point to that article and revised the footnote to incorporate this new information.
— DLJessup (talk) 15:01, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Excellent. I do not know how to make those changes but wanted to have the new information available. Chronicler3 21:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)