# 1828 Presidential Election The rematch of 1824. [[Andrew Jackson]] defeated incumbent [[John Quincy Adams]] in a landslide — 178 to 83 electoral votes, 56% to 43.6% in the popular vote. The campaign was one of the nastiest in American history: pro-Jackson press called Adams an aristocrat, a monarchist, a procurer of women for the Russian czar; pro-Adams press called Jackson a murderer (for his duels) and his wife Rachel a bigamist (for marrying Jackson before her divorce from her first husband was finalized). Rachel Jackson died of a heart attack in December 1828 between the election and the inauguration; Jackson blamed the Adams campaign for her death and never forgave the Adams faction. The 1828 election is the **first modern mass-electorate American election**. Property requirements for voting had been substantially eliminated in most states during the 1820s; turnout among eligible white males nearly tripled from 1824 (27%) to 1828 (57.6%). [[Martin Van Buren]]'s newly-organized Democratic Party machine mobilized this expanded electorate at scale — the operational birth of the **Democratic Party** as a continuous institution. ## Result - **[[Andrew Jackson]]** (Democrat) — 178 electoral votes, 56.0% popular (642,553 votes) - **[[John Quincy Adams]]** (National-Republican) — 83 electoral votes, 43.6% popular (500,897 votes) - Total: 261 electoral votes ## Right-wing relevance The 1828 election is the operational template for **populist insurgent victories in American politics**. The structural elements — the outsider-coded candidate, the establishment-elite-coded incumbent, the four-year buildup of grievance, the mass-electorate mobilization, the brutal personal campaign — are recognizable in every subsequent populist victory the country has seen, from the Jackson template through Bryan (1896 — though he lost) through Roosevelt (1932) through Reagan (1980) through Trump (2016). Trump's frequent invocation of Jackson — the Oval Office portrait, the rhetorical claim to the "people's president" mantle — points specifically at 1828 as the precedent. The expanded-electorate / mass-mobilization machinery the Van Buren Democrats built in 1828 is the operational ancestor of every subsequent American political party's mass-organizing infrastructure. ## Connections - [[Andrew Jackson]] — Winner; founder-in-effect of the Democratic Party. - [[John Quincy Adams]] — Incumbent; only the second president (after his father in 1800) to lose reelection. - [[Martin Van Buren]] — Architect of the Jackson coalition and the Democratic Party machine. ---