Which president was the only one to not get elected?

Answer 1

Technically, all US presidents but one (we'll get to that in a minute) have been elected by the electoral college. The electoral college is nominally supposed to follow the dictates of the popular election, though on a state-by-state basis as opposed to the overall totals, which is what makes it possible for someone to gather a majority of the popular vote and still lose the election.

There is also something called a "faithless elector", which is an elector who votes differently than how their state's popular election turned out. Though this has happened in 157 cases so far, none of them have ever changed the final result of an election, because most of the time these electors are acting individually in an attempt to make a political statement rather than to actually subvert the will of the people. The closest this has ever come to actually making a difference was in 1836, when 23 electors from Virginia refused to vote for Richard Mentor Johnson for Vice-President, causing there to be no vice-presidential candidate with a majority of votes (Johnson had the highest number of votes, but not a majority). Since no candidate had a majority, the election fell to the Senate to decide, where Johnson won anyway. The largest number of faithless electors in a single election was in 1872, when 63 of the 66 electors pleged to support Horace Greeley voted for other candidates instead, because Greeley had died (3 voted for Greeley anyway). However, Grant had a clear majority of the vote, so even if they had decided to pool their votes for a single candidate it wouldn't have mattered.

The one President who was not elected as either President or Vice-President by the electoral college, and the one you're probably thinking of, is Gerald Ford. He was appointed Vice-President by President Richard Nixon when Nixon's elected VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned due to criminal charges against him. When Nixon himself later resigned, Ford became President without ever participating in a presidential election.

Ford was an elected official, though: he was a congressman, and in fact was House Minority Leader (the Republicans were the minority party in the House at the time) when Nixon chose him as VP. (It wasn't all that much of a choice. Nixon's appointee had to be confirmed by congress, and when Nixon sought advice from congressional leaders, their unanimous recommendation was Ford.)

Answer 2

Gerald Ford. He became Nixon's VP after Agnew resigned, and then moved up to president after Nixon resigned.

All other vice presidents who later became president were the original running mates in preceding elections.

Answer 3

Gerald Ford fits the bill.

Answer 4

james polk

was he ever president