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Lincoln Lincoln won a decisive victory in the electoral college: with 180 votes, he was well ahead of Breckinridge, in second, with 72 votes (indeed he had a comfortable majority of 180 to 123). However, Lincoln received only 40% of the popular vote (1,866,000 votes) His victory was very much a sectional one: with not a single ballot cast for him in ten of the 33 states, his support was heavily concentrated in the Northern free states. Douglas 1,383,000 popular vote Douglas was …

…did not win a majority of votes in the slave states: 55% had voted for more pro-Union and compromise candidates, in the form of Douglas and mainly Bell. Indeed, even in the 11 states which were to form the Southern Confederacy, his popular vote was tiny. Anyway the results when taken as a whole did not spell disaster for the South. The Southerners still controlled the Supreme Court and neither House in Congress had a Republican majority.