1832 жылғы АҚШ президенттік сайлауы

12th quadrennial U. S. presidential election

The 1832 United States presidential election was the 12th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, November 2 to Wednesday, December 5, 1832. Incumbent president Andrew Jackson, candidate of the Democratic Party, defeated Henry Clay, candidate of the National Republican Party. The election saw the first use of the presidential nominating conventions, and the Democrats, National Republicans, and the Anti Masonic Party all used conventions to select their candidates. Jackson won re nomination with no opposition, and the 1832 Democratic National Convention replaced Vice President John C. Calhoun with Martin Van Buren. The National Republican Convention nominated a ticket led by Clay, a Kentuckian who had served as Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams. The Anti Masonic Party, one of the first major U. S. third parties, nominated former Attorney General William Wirt. Jackson faced heavy criticism for his actions in the Bank War, but remained popular among the general public. He won a majority of the popular vote and 219 of the 288 electoral votes, carrying most states outside New England. Clay won 37.4% of the popular vote and 49 electoral votes, while Wirt won 7.8% of the popular vote and carried the state of Vermont. Virginia Governor John Floyd, who had not actively campaigned, won South Carolina's electoral votes. After the election, members of the National Republican Party and the Anti Masonic Party formed the Whig Party, which became the Democrats' primary opponent over the next two decades.

With the demise of the congressional nominating caucus in the election of 1824, the political system was left without an institutional method on the national level for determining presidential nominations. For this reason, the candidates of 1832 were chosen by national conventions. The first national convention was held by the Anti Masonic Party in Baltimore, Maryland, in September 1831. The National Republican Party and the Democratic Party soon imitated them, also holding conventions in Baltimore, which would remain a favored venue for national political conventions for decades.

The Barbour Democratic National Convention was held in June 1832 in Staunton, Virginia. Jackson was nominated for president and Philip P. Barbour for vice president. Barbour withdrew, but the ticket appeared on the ballot in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia.

While the South Carolina state legislature remained nominally under Democratic control, it refused to support Jackson's reelection due to the ongoing Nullification Crisis, and instead opted to back a ticket proposed by the Nullifier Party led by John C. Calhoun. The Nullifiers were made up of former members of the Democratic Republican Party who had largely supported Jackson at the previous election, but were much stauncher proponents of states' rights, which ultimately led them to repudiate Jackson during his first term. Calhoun himself declined to head the ticket, instead nominating Governor of Virginia John Floyd, who also opposed Jackson's stance on states' rights. Merchant and economist Henry Lee was nominated as Floyd's running mate. Ultimately, Floyd's candidacy amounted to little more than a protest against Jackson, as his ticket did not run in any state outside of South Carolina. He nonetheless received all the state's electoral votes.

Jackson rode into office in 1828 on the strength of a coalition that included southern opponents of the Tariff of 1828, western advocates of internal improvements, many former Democratic Republicans, and some former Federalists. Henry Clay predicted this unwieldy marriage of disparate and in many cases hostile interests would soon collapse under the pressures of office. Clay determined to split the Jacksonian party on the issue of the American System by engineering a confrontation over the Second Bank of the United States. He persuaded the president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, to request recharter a full four years early in order to coincide with the presidential election. As expected, Jackson vetoed the recharter bill and issued a stinging veto message criticizing the bank's interference in national politics. Clay predicted the president's hostility to the nationalist economic program would prove unpopular with voters, particularly in Pennsylvania where the bank was headquartered, and hand the Anti Jacksonians victory at the polls. Simultaneously, Jackson faced defections from the southern wing of his party over the Nullification Crisis. These southerners objected strongly to the tariff and argued for the right of the states to nullify unfriendly federal laws, a position Jackson refused to endorse. Clay hoped to bring the disgruntled ex Jacksonians into the fold, but his tactic of promoting the American System as the major issue of the campaign was ill designed for this purpose. While some Southerners did favor the bank, they were unwilling to break publicly with Jackson on this issue, and Vice President Calhoun was overtly hostile to the American System by 1832. In South Carolina, the faction loyal to Calhoun nominated a slate of independent electors who voted for Governor John Floyd of Virginia. Elsewhere, dissident Southern Jacksonians protested the nomination of Martin Van Buren by supporting Philip P. Barbour for vice president but were unwilling to break with Jackson himself. As the Barbour movement suggests, Jackson's personal popularity worked against the growth of opposition politics in the South despite the growing dissatisfaction with the national administration. Meanwhile, Jackson's northern opponents were hurt by the divided state of the opposition. The failure of Anti Jacksonians to unite behind a single candidate for president alarmed leaders like William Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed, who worked feverishly to avoid a disastrous split in the opposition vote. In New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Anti Masons and National Republicans organized fusion tickets with electors pledged to support whichever candidate stood the best chance of defeating Jackson in the electoral college. Jackson carried all three states, however, along with their combined 93 electoral votes. His margin in Pennsylvania was much reduced from 1828, but still wider than the Democratic majority in the gubernatorial election held in October, due largely to the drop in support for the Anti Masons. The Anti Jacksonian "Union ticket" foreshadowed the merger of both parties with disaffected Southern Jacksonians in 1834 to form the Whig Party, which would constitute the major opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats for the remainder of the Second Party System. While Clay hoped to alienate the different wings of the Democratic Party from each other by promoting the bank as an issue, his strategy backfired, as Jackson's veto message compellingly portrayed him as the defender of the common people against the furious assault of the financial interests. Events of the previous decade had not endeared the bank to working people, and they identified with Jackson's portrait of the "Monster Bank" as corrupt, self interested, and destructive to democratic egalitarianism. Meanwhile, Clay's high handed treatment of the Anti Masons discouraged unity among Anti Jacksonians, and the unpopularity of the National Republicans frustrated efforts to unite all opponents of the administration under a single roof.