Some writers blame the Democrats, and especially the Southern Democrats, for Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. The split in the Democratic Party that summer is said to have opened the door for the new Republican Party. Because the divided Democrats could not agree on a candidate, this theory goes, the split in the party allowed Lincoln to capture the White House with a mere 39 percent of the popular vote.

This is provably false. Lincoln would have won even if all the non-Lincoln votes had gone to a single candidate. Yet the "divided Democrats" myth persists. So here's the math.

Lincoln got 180 electoral votes and 1,865,593 popular votes.

Breckenridge got 72 electoral votes and 848,356 popular votes.

Douglas got 12 electoral votes and 1,382,713 popular votes.

Bell got 39 electoral votes and 592,906 popular votes.

So even if you take all the Democratic electors into one pool, it only comes to 123 votes. Lincoln still wins. But what about the popular vote? As Americans learned in 2000, popular vote victory doesn't always translate into a ride up Pennsylvania Avenue. Surely 39 percent of the popular vote couldn't have carried the White House.

Amazingly, it could. Here is the breakdown of the vote in the 33 states that then comprised the Union. Slightly different numbers are given in different sources, but they do not vary by more than a dozen or so in most cases, and never by enough to change the outcomes:

STATE	ELECTORS	LINCOLN	DOUGLAS	BRECKENRIDGE	BELL
ALABAMA	9	0	13,618	48,669	27,875
ARKANSAS	4	0	5,357	28,732	20,063
CALIFORNIA	4	38,733	37,999	33,969	9,111
CONNECTICUT	6	43,488	15,431	14,372	1,528
DELAWARE	3	3,822	1,066	7,339	3,888
FLORIDA	3	0	223	8,277	4,801
GEORGIA	10	0	11,581	52,176	42,960
ILLINOIS	11	172,171	160,215	2,331	4,914
INDIANA	13	139,033	115,509	12,295	5,306
IOWA	4	70,302	55,639	1,035	1,763
KENTUCKY	12	1,364	25,651	53,143	66,058
LOUISIANA	6	0	7,625	22,681	20,204
MAINE	8	62,811	29,693	6,368	2,046
MARYLAND	8	2,294	5,966	42,482	41,760
MASSACHUSETTS	13	106,684	34,370	6,163	22,331
MICHIGAN	6	88,481	65,057	805	415
MINNESOTA	4	22,069	11,920	748	50
MISSISSIPPI	7	0	3,282	40,768	25,045
MISSOURI	9	17,028	58,801	31,362	58,372
NEW HAMPSHIRE	5	37,519	25,887	2,125	412
NEW JERSEY	7*	58,346	62,869	0	0
NEW YORK	35	362,646	312,510	0	0
N. CAROLINA	10	0	2,737	48,846	45,129
OHIO	23	231,709	187,421	11,406	12,194
OREGON	3	5,329	4,136	5,075	218
PENNSYLVANIA	27	268,030	16,765	178,871	12,776
RHODE ISLAND	4	12,244	7,707	0	0
S. CAROLINA	8**	--	--	--	--
TENNESSEE	12	0	11,281	65,097	69,728
TEXAS	4	0	18	47,454	15,383
VERMONT	5	33,808	8,649	218	1,969
VIRGINIA	15	1,887	16,198	74,325	74,481
WISCONSIN	5	86,110	65,021	887	161

*New Jersey's electoral votes were split, four for Lincoln, three for Douglas.

**South Carolina still did not hold popular votes for presidential electors. The state's electors backed Breckenridge.

It's interesting to compare the electoral votes from today and see the relative importance of certain states, especially the enormous importance of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The seven deep south states had 47 electoral votes, but were outnumbered by Pennsylvania and Ohio alone. Vermont had more electors than Texas.

To make Lincoln lose this election, obviously, the states that have to shift are the ones where he got electoral votes. You have to assume all the non-Lincoln voters would vote for one candidate. In fact there was such a fusion ticket in New York, Rhode Island, and a few other Northern places. It wasn't enough. In other states, a fusion was unlikely. In places like Baltimore, the Constitutional Union Party vote represented local interests, or die-hard Know-Nothingism which likely would have gone for Lincoln if it had no other option.

But allow that every non-Lincoln vote in 1860 could have gone to a single candidate, to give the "divided Democrats" argument every advantage. Here's what you get:

STATE	ELECTORS	LINCOLN	non-LINCOLN
CALIFORNIA	4	38,733	81,079
CONNECTICUT	6	43,488	31,331
ILLINOIS	11	172,171	167,460
INDIANA	13	139,033	133,110
IOWA	4	70,302	58,437
MAINE	8	62,811	38,107
MASSACHUSETTS	13	106,684	62,864
MICHIGAN	6	88,481	66,277
MINNESOTA	4	22,069	12,718
NEW HAMPSHIRE	5	37,519	28,424
NEW JERSEY	7	58,346	62,869
NEW YORK	35	362,646	312,510
OHIO	23	231,709	211,021
OREGON	3	5,329	9,429
PENNSYLVANIA	27	268,030	208,412
RHODE ISLAND	4	12,244	7,707
VERMONT	5	33,808	10,836
WISCONSIN	5	86,110	66,069

Only California's 4 electoral votes and Oregon's 3 switch into the Democrat category. Lincoln's margin of victory narrows, especially in states like Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. But he still wins in those places. The "fusion" vote in New Jersey is unchanged. The electors there still split 4-3.

Lincoln has 173 electoral votes; his imaginary opponent has 130.

The Republican party had pored over election returns for six years, and it knew what it had to do to win. It had a regional strategy to win the election by playing the electoral college numbers game. It did so splendidly. The South was cut out of the political equation. The divided Democratic Party was a non-issue.

It's not as though the split Democratic ticket kept voters at home, either. The voter turnout rate in 1860 was the second-highest on record (81.2 percent, after only 1876, with 81.8 percent).

Choosing Lincoln as the candidate was all part of the strategy -- as was keeping him quiet until after the election so that the carefully constructed Republican platform of 1860, with a plank for each interest group, stood as the real candidate. Seward was the most famous Republican, but Seward, no matter how he tempered his rhetoric, was seen as a radical. And the Republicans -- not just the party bosses, but the rank and file -- had been studying this one hard since 1856, and they knew how many votes they needed to swing in three crucial Northern border states that cared little for abolitionists.

Lincoln's great virtue in 1860 was that he had not been nationally prominent long enough to have powerful enemies or a real reputation. He could be the anti-slavery candidate in Massachusetts, and the tariff protection candidate in Pennsylvania, and the genial rail-splitter in places where neither issue aroused much heat.

He could even appeal to the important Know-Nothing element in the patchwork Republican Party, which rejected Seward. Former Know-Nothings supported him. "We cannot elect extreme men," one said [Richard M. Corwine]. "Moderation in their past life & present views, must mark them or we cannot elect them." Corwine was one of the lower North delegates who blocked Seward early in the convention and opened the door for Lincoln.

Politics are strange. Lincoln and Seward both opposed Nativism, but as historian Tyler Anbinder has shown (in "Nativism and Slavery"), the Republicans needed those Fillmore votes, and the old Know-Nothings had a conservative tendency that rejected Seward out of hand. And Lincoln did reward them with patronage, Simon Cameron being a notorious example, though that was a double-dip patronage: it rewarded Pennsylvania as well.