A presidential election was held in Pennsylvania on November 6, 1860, as part of the 1860 United States presidential election. The People's ticket of the former U.S. representative from Illinois's 7th congressional district and the senior U.S. senator from Maine Hannibal Hamlin defeated the Fusion ticket nominated by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.
Lincoln was nominated by the 1860 Republican National Convention and ran as the candidate of the People's Party in Pennsylvania. Formed in 1858, the party united Pennsylvania Republicans and Know Nothings on a protectionist platform that appealed to antislavery and nativist constituencies in both parties. The Pennsylvania Democratic party selected its state ticket in advance of the 1860 Democratic National Conventions, which resulted in a split between the supporters of Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge. The so-called "Reading ticket," named after the city in Pennsylvania where the state convention met, was composed of 15 Breckenridge supporters and 12 Douglas supporters; the electors agreed to vote for whichever candidate stood the best chance of defeating Lincoln in the event the fusion ticket carried the state. A minority of Douglas Democrats in Pennsylvania opposed this arrangement and nominated their own ticket of 27 candidates, including the 12 Douglas electors on the Reading ticket. The split in the Democratic ranks effectively conceded the state to Lincoln, ending fears that the defection of protectionist voters to the Constitutional Union Party could cost Republicans the state's 27 electoral votes.
General election
Results
Pennsylvania chose 27 electors on a statewide general ticket. Nineteenth-century election laws required voters to elect each member of the Electoral College individually, rather than as a group. This sometimes resulted in small differences in the number of votes cast for electors pledged to the same presidential candidate, if some voters did not vote for all the electors nominated by a party.
Twelve candidates ran on both the Fusion ("Reading") and the "Straight" Douglas tickets; the official returns compiled by the secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania record the total number of votes for each candidate but do not include a full breakdown by ticket. Joseph Laubach won 194,834 votes as a Fusion–Douglas elector, the highest total for an candidate endorsed on both tickets. John Alexander Ahl received the most votes of any candidate nominated exclusively on the Reading ticket, and his statewide result is shown here as the best approximation of support for the Fusion electors. Similarly, the result shown for the "Straight" Douglas electors reflects the highest total for a candidate nominated exclusively on the Douglas ticket.
Analysis
Pennsylvania voted for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, over the fusion ticket. Lincoln won Pennsylvania by a margin of 18.72%. Lincoln's victory was the first of eighteen out of nineteen Republican victories in the state, as Pennsylvania would not vote Democratic again until Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, and would not vote for a different candidate again until Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party bid in 1912. Lincoln fashioned his victory in Pennsylvania out of Yankee and some Scots-Irish support.
Pennsylvania in the election was one of the four states that had a fusion ticket for the Democratic Party. The other three states were New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.
The 1860 presidential election in Pennsylvania began a trend in which the state would vote the same as nearby Michigan in presidential elections, as the two states have voted for president in lockstep with each other on all but three occasions since Lincoln's victory – 1932, 1940, and 1976.