Following is a table of the United States presidential elections in Mississippi, in chronological order by year. Since its admission to statehood in 1817, Mississippi has participated in every U.S. presidential election except the election of 1864, during the American Civil War, when the state had seceded to join the Confederacy, and the election of 1868, when the state was undergoing Reconstruction.
A socially conservativeDeep South state, Mississippi was dominated by the Democratic Party for most of its history, voting almost exclusively Democratic from the founding of the party in the 1820s until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, the state has become heavily Republican, like most of the south.
Notably, Mississippi has also almost always voted for the same presidential candidate as neighboring Alabama. In more than two hundred years of presidential elections, they have supported the same candidate in all but one; the election of 1840, when Mississippi voted for William Henry Harrison and Alabama for Martin Van Buren (in 1868, only Alabama participated, as Mississippi had not yet been readmitted to the Union).
Winners of the state are in bold. The shading refers to the state winner, and not the national winner.
Elections from 1864 to present
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The election of 1860 was a complex realigning election in which the breakdown of the previous two-party alignment culminated in four parties each competing for influence in different parts of the country. The result of the election, with the victory of an ardent opponent of slavery, spurred the secession of eleven states and brought about the American Civil War.
The election of 1824 was a complex realigning election following the collapse of the prevailing Democratic-Republican Party, resulting in four different candidates each claiming to carry the banner of the party, and competing for influence in different parts of the country. The election was the only one in history to be decided by the House of Representatives under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution after no candidate secured a majority of the electoral vote. It was also the only presidential election in which the candidate who received a plurality of electoral votes (Andrew Jackson) did not become president, a source of great bitterness for Jackson and his supporters, who proclaimed the election of Adams a corrupt bargain.
In the election of 1820, incumbent President James Monroe ran effectively unopposed, winning all electoral votes (including Mississippi’s two electoral votes) except one vote in New Hampshire. The popular vote was primarily directed to filling the office of vice president.
^George Wallace, 1968; Harry F. Byrd, 1960; Strom Thurmond, 1948.
^ abFor purposes of these lists, other national candidates are defined as those who won at least one electoral vote, or won at least ten percent of the vote in multiple states.
^Was allied with a slate of unpledged electors in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina
^Three other candidates ran and received electoral votes nationally as part of the unsuccessful Whig strategy to defeat Martin Van Buren by running four candidates with local appeal in different regions of the country. The others were William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster, and Willie Person Mangum. None of these candidates appeared on the ballot in Mississippi.
