At some point in time, I thought myself into believing that no president had been elected without winning Ohio, so I wanted to make sure I haven’t been spreading vicious lies and rumors around so I started looking for a site that had election results from the last couple of elections. Lo and behold, I found this great site put together by Dave Liep! I was very impressed with the amount of data he had collected as well as the presentation of it, it is a highly informative site. Anyway, back to the point. I scrolled though the elections he has on file (1789-2000) and found out that I was indeed, WRONG. Not only did get proved wrong, I found out that’s it’s happened a total of 7 times! Here is the break down (starts from 1804, since that is when Ohio first counted in a presidential election):
- John Kennedy 1960
- Grover Cleveland both 1892 and 1884 (they must really have hated him)
- James Buchanan 1856
- Zachary Taylor 1848
- James Polk 1844
- Marten Van Buren 1836 (no electoral majority)
- John Quincy Adams 1824 (no electoral majority)
As I was a little downtrodden about spreading my filthy lies, I decided to try and figure out why I would have just made something like that up. I didn’t have to go far before I found this entry on Dave’s blog (he’s really proving to be useful for making me look bad) explaining it. Apparently I left a state out of the picture (Florida doesn’t deserve any credit anyway) completely! Well, now that’s cleared up and I can rest easy. I also noticed that a third party hasn’t won a state since 1968, although that situation was more of a redneck rebellion than a real third party. It’s so sad about the one-or-the-other choice. I for one would like to give many thanks to Dave for providing such a useful repository of information, even if it did prove me wrong. I should join or something.
On a completely different note, I have to point out that you can now get your very own Hello Kitty card! Now your little girl spend your hard earned money with a super-cute credit card. Alternately you could give it to a boy and play a game to see how many Boot Town’s he can use it in before he gets his ass kicked.
(via Good Grief and J-Walk)