After a nightmarish four years with Donald Trump at the helm, Americans can now breath. The U.S. elections are over and Joe Biden has been elected the president of the United States. He will commence to discharge his duties for the sole superpower in the world on January 20, 2021. One thing that most people will notice is that the election was far from being close when compared to the one in 2016. So the purpose of this article is to examine the top ten closest U.S. elections in the country’s history. Let us get started!
| S/N | Election Year | Presidential Candidates | Popular Vote Won | Electoral Votes won | Number of States won |
| 1 | 1960 | John F. Kennedy Vs Richard Nixon | 34,220,984-24,108,137 | 303-219 | 23-37 |
| 2 | 2000 | George W. Bush vs Al Gore | 50,456,004-50,999,897 | 271 – 266 | 30 – 20+DC |
| 3 | 1976 | Jimmy Carter vs Gerald Ford | 40,831,881 – 39,148,634 | 297 – 240 | 23+DC – 27 |
| 4 | 1876 | Rutherford Hayes vs Samuel Tilden | 4,034,311 – 4,288,546 | 185 – 184 | 21 – 17 |
| 5 | 1880 | James Garfield vs Winfield Hancock | 4,446,158 – 4,444,260 | 214 – 155 | 19 – 19 |
| 6 | 1888 | Benjamin Harrison vs Grover Cleveland | 5,443,892 – 5,534,488 | 233 – 168 | 20 – 18 |
| 7 | 1884 | Grover Cleveland vs James G. Blaine | 4,914,482 – 4,856,905 | 219 – 182 | 20 – 18 |
| 8 | 1844 | James Polk vs Henry Clay | 1,339,494 – 1,300,004 | 170 – 105 | 15 – 11 |
| 9 | 1824 | John Adams vs Andrew Jackson | 113,122 – 151,271 | 84 – 99 | 7 – 12 |
| 10 | 2016 | Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton | 62,984,828 – 65,844,610 | 304 – 227 | 30 – 20 |
From the table above, one can see that the Democratic Party presidential candidates usually get more popular votes than their Republican Party counterparts. This happened in the 2020 election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The same happened in election year 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But the popular votes do not matter since Clinton did not become president even if more people voted for her in the popular vote.
This is because the United States place more importance on the electoral college votes won. A presidential candidate must win at least 270 electoral college votes in order to be president. But you can see from the table that actually most presidential elections had a president that did not win the 270 electoral votes minimum required for them to be declared winners.
In such a case, the Supreme Court will need to decide on whom between the two candidates become president. The court will evaluate to see whether there were any irregularities before and during the election in order to arrive at a decision.
This happened in the election year 2000 in which the Supreme Court sided with George W. Bush against his challenger Al Gore. The Supreme Court only looks at the way elections were conducted in a specific state in order to determine how electoral votes can be awarded based on what votes to count and what not to count.
