1876 United States presidential election

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 7, 1876. Republican Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio very narrowly defeated Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Following President Ulysses S. Grant's decision to retire after his second term, U.S. Representative James G. Blaine emerged as frontrunner for the Republican nomination; however, Blaine was unable to win a majority at the 1876 Republican National Convention, which settled on Hayes as a compromise candidate. The 1876 Democratic National Convention nominated Tilden on the second ballot.

The election was among the most contentious in American history, and was only resolved by the Compromise of 1877, in which Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction in exchange for recognition of his presidency. In the first count, Tilden had 184 electoral votes (one vote short of a majority) to Hayes's 165, with the 20 votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon disputed. To address this constitutional crisis, Congress established the Electoral Commission, which awarded all twenty votes and thus the presidency to Hayes in a strict party-line vote. Some Democratic representatives filibustered the commission's decision, hoping to prevent Hayes's inauguration; their filibuster was ultimately ended by party leader Samuel J. Randall. On March 2, 1877, the House and Senate confirmed Hayes as president. This was the last election taken under Reconstruction, in which some Southern states voted for a Republican candidate. Following the election Southern states were able to fully implement Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising black Americans, beginning a period of Democrat domination known as the Solid South. No Republican presidential nominee would win a former Confederate state until Warren G. Harding in the 1920 United States presidential election.

It was the second of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner did not win a plurality of the national popular vote, after the 1824 election. Although Tilden defeated Hayes in the official popular vote tally, the election involved substantial electoral fraud, voter intimidation by paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts, and disenfranchisement of black Republicans. The election had the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting-age population in American history, at 82.6%. Tilden's 50.9% is the largest share of the popular vote received by a candidate who was not elected to the presidency, and this was the only presidential election in U.S. history in which the losing candidate won a majority of the popular vote. Tilden was also the last person to win an outright majority of the popular vote until William McKinley in 1896. As of 2024, this remains the only presidential election in which both candidates were sitting governors.