Only 2 Presidents in History Earned a Smaller Popular Vote Percentage Than Trump

The final vote tally is in, and what it reveals says a lot about just how unique the 2016 presidential election truly was.

According to data collected by the US Elections Atlas, only two other presidential candidates have ever earned a higher percentage of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton and still lost the election: Andrew Jackson and Samuel Tilden. Clinton outpaced Trump by 2.1 percent in the popular vote, earning 65,844,954 votes to his 62,979,879. Jackson won the popular vote by 10 percent in 1824, but John Quincy Adams clinched the presidency. And in 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes became president, Tilden outpaced him in the popular vote by three percent. (That election is widely considered one of the, if not the, most contentious and divisive elections in American history.) That means it's been 140 years since a presidential candidate earned a greater percentage of the people's vote than Clinton did this year.

In other words? Hayes and Adams are the only two presidents to have ever earned a lower percentage of the popular vote than Donald Trump — despite Trump's baseless claim he would have also won the popular vote if the number of people who "voted illegally" were removed from the count.

Which presidents earned the three highest-ever margins of the popular vote? Warren G. Harding in 1920 with 26.2 percent, Calvin Coolidge in 1924 with 25.2 percent, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 with 24.3 percent. When President Obama was first elected in 2008, he won by a 7.3 percent margin.

So, how did Adams and Hayes do once they were actually on the job? In 2013, statistician Nate Silver reviewed previous scholarly rankings of our 43 past presidents. He found that while Adams landed in the middle at 20, Hayes came in at a fairly dismal 32. (Time magazine has also given Hayes the distinction of being one of its 10 most forgettable presidents in American history.)