Abraham Lincoln received 180 electoral votes in the 1860 presidential election. That total gave him a clear majority of the 303 electoral votes available, even though he won less than 40 percent of the nationwide popular vote.
The election was a four-way contest among Republican Lincoln, Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. Lincoln carried all 18 free states, giving him 180 electoral votes, while receiving no electoral votes from the slave states that later formed the Confederacy. The fractured opposition allowed him to win the presidency without a majority of the popular vote.
Breckinridge finished with 72 electoral votes, Bell with 39, and Douglas with 12. Lincoln’s popular total was about 1.86 million votes, or 39.7 percent. South Carolina was unusual because its legislature selected electors rather than holding a popular presidential vote.
The result had enormous consequences. Southern leaders treated Lincoln’s election as evidence that their political influence was collapsing and used it as the immediate catalyst for secession. South Carolina left the Union six weeks after the election, beginning the secession crisis that led to war.