1832 U.S. presidential election

In 1832 President Andrew Jackson won a second term with 219 electoral votes and about 55 percent of the popular vote, defeating Henry Clay of the National Republicans, who won 49. William Wirt of the Anti-Masonic Party, usually counted as the first third party in American politics, carried Vermont, and South Carolina gave its 11 votes to John Floyd of Virginia. Martin Van Buren became vice president, replacing John C. Calhoun, who had broken with Jackson.²

The central issue was the Second Bank of the United States. Clay and the bank's president, Nicholas Biddle, pushed a bill to renew its charter four years early, hoping to make it an election issue. Jackson vetoed it in July 1832, attacking the bank as a privileged monopoly that helped make 'the rich richer and the potent more powerful,' and voters backed him. This was also the first election in which parties chose candidates at national conventions, a practice the Anti-Masons began in 1831. In November 1832 South Carolina declared the federal tariffs void within its borders, setting off the Nullification Crisis.¹²