Bush will be our 43rd president, and the 37th to win the office in an election. (5 presidents took office through the death or resignation of another president, and were never later elected in their own right. One president, Grover Cleveland, was elected on 2 non-consecutive occasions and became both the 22nd and 24th president.)

Bush will become the 19th Republican president. (This count includes Andrew Johnson. See note at bottom of this file for further detail.)

Bush will become the 17th governor to become president.

Bush will be only the second incumbent GOP governor to win the White House. The first incumbent GOP governor to win the White House was then-Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Ronald Reagan were all ex-governors when they were elected to the presidency. Roosevelt and Coolidge were also incumbent vice presidents who initially inherited the presidency upon the death of the president.)

Bush will be the first Texas governor ever to become president.

Bush will become the second president in history whose father was also president. (John Quincy Adams was elected in 1825, 24 years after his father John Adams left the White House. Bush will become president only 8 years after his father left the White House.)

Bush will be the first president to win the White House despite losing both New York and California in the general election -- the two states with the largest number of electoral votes.

Bush will be the 2nd president to win the White House despite losing the New Hampshire primary. (Bill Clinton was the first in 1992.)

Bush will be the fourth person to have won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. The other three were one-term presidents. (Both John Quincy Adams and Benjamin Harrison were defeated for re-election; Rutherford B. Hayes did not to run again.)

The last election which resulted in the Republican Party controlling the House, the Senate, and White House was 1952, when they seized all three from the Democrats. The two-year period covered by the 83rd Congress 1953 and 1954 represents the only time in the last half century in which the Republicans have held complete control of both the executive and legislative branches of government. The GOP subsequently lost control of both houses of Congress in the 1954 midterm election.

With Bush's win in the 2000 contest, Republicans have won 12 of 24 open presidential elections, and Democrats have won 6. (6 open elections took place in the 1700s and 1800s, prior to the creation of the Democratic and Republican parties.)

Only 5 others have been elected president without winning California (since it became a state in 1852). California has the largest number of electoral votes.

1880 – Garfield
1884 – Cleveland
1912 – Wilson
1960 – Kennedy
1976 – Carter

A NOTE ABOUT COUNTING ANDREW JOHNSON AS A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:
It is noted in this file that Bush will become the 19th Republican president. This fact is based on a count of presidents that considers Andrew Johnson a Republican. A majority of sources consulted for this file refer to a Johnson as a Republican; only a few refer to him as a Democrat. Johnson was a Democrat when he represented Tennessee in the United States Senate from 1857-1862, but he joined Lincoln on the Republican ticket in 1864, and thus became aligned against the Democratic Party in this election. (This ticket was actually referred to as the "National Union" ticket, but this was simply the Republican Party renaming itself.) Lincoln and Johnson were elected, and this was considered a "Republican" administration -- then Lincoln died, and Johnson completed Lincoln's term as president from 1865-1869. While the question of Johnson's appropriate party label is, in the end, more a judgment call than pure fact, we believe it is accurate to refer to a someone as a member of a certain political party when he runs on that party's national ticket.