Have there ever been any presidential elections in which a candidate received fewer popular votes than his opponent but was elected because they received a majority of electoral votes?

Answer 1

per wikipedia... The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Democratic candidate Al Gore, then Vice President, and Republican candidate George W. Bush, then governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush (1989-1993). Bill Clinton, the incumbent President, was vacating the position after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Bush narrowly won the November 7 election, with 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 (with one faithless elector abstaining in the official tally). The election featured a controversy over who won Florida's 25 electoral votes (and thus the presidency), the recount process in that state, and the unusual event that the losing candidate had received 543,816 more popular votes than the winner.

That was the third U.S. presidential election in which the popular votes from all of the states when added together indicated that the winner of the election was not the candidate preferred by a plurality of those who voted nationwide. The most controversial by far was the 1876 election. One of the things that made 1876 unique is the fact that the "loser", Gov. Samuel Tilden of NY, was not only the candidate preferred by most of the public as in the other two cases but was the preference of the majority of the public (more than 50% of the voting public supported Tilden).

The other time when the election winner was not the preferred candidate was in 1888. Grover Cleveland was the Democratic nominee in three elections, 1884, 1888 and 1892. The nationwide popular vote totals were on his side all three times (making him the only person beside FDR to have more than two popular vote totals in his favor). However, Benjamin Harrison won the 1888 election. In 1892 Grover Cleveland became the 4th person to win a US presidential election after losing the previous one (the others were Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison).

Even though the candidate with the most electoral votes was the candidate with the most popular votes in 94% of the 48 elections since we started keeping track of popular votes, the two percentages are rarely similar. That is due to the practice of about every state of giving 100% of its electoral votes to the one party ticket with the plurality of statewide popular votes without regard to the relative popularity of each ticket.

Answer 2

A canidate can win the popular vote and not win the election. This happened in the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore (former Vice President to Bill Clinton) and George W. Bush (former President). It was a very close election. Bush went onto the White House.

Answer 3

It is possible that a candidate could win the "national" popular vote total but lose the electoral vote total. However, the electoral vote of every state accurately reflects the popular vote within that state. A candidate could win the electoral votes in a large state such as California winning the state by a huge margin. However, the opposing candidate could win the electoral votes in other states because a majority of the voters in those states vote for the opposing candidate.