The 39.8% Solution.

If you think we’re a ‘house divided’ today...

Abraham Lincoln was elected president the first time around with not even 40% of the popular vote.

39.8% to be precise.

And in 10 slave states he got no votes. Zero. Because his name wasn't even on the ballot.

And if, for some reason, Lincoln's name had been on the ballot in those states, it wouldn’t have made a difference. In Virginia, one of the few slave states his name appeared, he got just 1% of the vote.

To make matters worse, by the time Lincoln arrived in Washington for his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had already seceded from the Union. They didn’t even wait for him to take office.

And Jefferson Davis had already been sworn in as president of the CSA.

Yet Lincoln managed to save the union, abolish slavery, and change our founding story from the slavery-accommodating Constitution to the Declaration of Independence, which declared that our founding proposition was “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Glad he made it to the White House when he did.

Happy Birthday.