Word: popularizer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! I chuse him to act, not think." With electors emasculated, party leaders in a few states pushed through the winner-take-all method of awarding a state's total electoral vote to the popular-vote champion...
More trouble developed in 1824. With the Federalist Party all but dead, the presidential vote split among four Democrats. Kentucky's Henry Clay and Georgia's William H. Crawford each won 13% of the popular vote, and their electoral votes were enough to deny a majority to Andrew Jackson, the popular winner with 152,933 votes (42.2%). In the House, Clay threw his support to the runner-up, John Quincy Adams, who had collected 31.9% of the popular vote. Clay's action made Adams President, and by no small coincidence, Clay became Secretary of State. Though Jackson...
Jackson's arguments against the process came back to life in 1876, when New York's Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden won the popular presidential vote with 4,287,670 ballots (50.9%). Even so, a special commission awarded the electoral votes of four disputed states to his opponent, Ohio's Republican Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, who thereupon squeaked into the White House by one electoral vote. Newspapers promptly pilloried Hayes as "His Fraudulency...
...doubtful if a loser in one of today's superheated campaigns would be so graceful-or indeed whether a minority President like Adams or Hayes could deal with Congress or the world on so minuscule a mandate. Both Harry Truman in 1948 (with 49.6% of the popular vote) and John Kennedy in 1960 (49.5%) were hampered in their dealings with Congress by their minority status...
...world governments grant their Chief Executive a more powerful mandate. Save for Argentina, Finland, India, Portugal and West Germany, which use modified Electoral College systems, democratic nations that have written their constitutions in the years since 1787 have generally avoided the Electoral College compromise in favor of either direct popular election (as in France and Mexico) or a variation on the English parliamentary system...