The last installment of the series and inquiry was posted over a year ago, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. At the end of Part 5, the field for consideration as the Worst President Ever stood at six: the field is now Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter.
I am glad, as it turns out, that I delayed posting the last chapter until now. A year ago, it would have been unfair and unwise to rank the current President (sort of) in the competition. Now, it is fair to say, a verdict on Joe Biden will not be premature.
Part 5 ended with Ronald Reagan, leaving #41, George H.W. Bush as the next contestant. Bush I, as I like to call him, is a member of a couple of Presidential clubs, none of them complimentary or prestigious.
Bush is in the small group of Presidents who never would have been elected to the top job if their predecessor had not ostentatiously designated them as a anointed successors to continue their policies. Only extremely popular and successful Chief Executives can do this. Before Bush, who was anointed as a worthy successor by Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson had pushed his protege and Vice-President, Martin Van Buren, into the White House, and nearly a century later Teddy Roosevelt did the same with his best friend, William Howard Taft. Franklin Roosevelt could have also done it, but he just kept running for office himself instead. Arguably President Eisenhower could have declared Richard Nixon as the one to carry out a third Eisenhower term, but he didn’t: his support for Nixon was tepid at best, and Ike’s popularity at the end of his administration was not in the Jackson-Teddy range. Like Van Buren and Taft, Papa Bush was a mediocre leader at best, and also like them, was a one-term President.
Bush is also a member of the “Vice-Presidents elected President without first becoming President upon the death of a President” club. It is not an impressive group: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Van Buren, Nixon, Bush I and Biden. If we were playing the “Sesame Street” game “One of these things is not like the other,” Jefferson would be the obvious answer.
The third club Bush belongs to is the “President by Default” club whose only other member is #15, James Buchanan. Like Buchanan, George H.W. Bush was a career government bureaucrat who jumped from one position to another, until he had nowhere to go but up. Call them Peter Principle Presidents: with the top job, both Bush and Buchanan reached their level of incompetence. Neither had any feel for leadership, in a job that requires that above all.
I don’t think anyone would argue that Bush I was the Worst President Ever, or even the worst President Bush, but he is one of my least favorite Presidents. After the successful first Iraq War, Bush’s popularity was nearly in the 90% range. In the American Presidency popularity is power: Bush had an opportunity to accomplish something grand and good that under normal political conditions would be unachievable. He could have addressed the national debt, the fiscal mess in Social Security, healthcare, immigration…the list is long. Instead, he did nothing. Bush just frittered away his moment of power, at one point even saying through his Chief of Staff, John Sununu, that everything was hunky-dory and no major initiatives were needed. This is the antithesis of leadership, also imagination, stewardship, and responsibility.
The present inquiry isn’t seeking to find the President who most spectacularly squandered his opportunities, or this Bush would be a leading contender. He was a weak President, but his lack of ambition or initiative stopped him from being a bad one just as it prevented him from being a good one.
Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.
There have been many times when I felt that #42, William Jefferson Clinton, should be in the running for the Worst President Ever. Like the first Bush, he squandered an opportunity to do great things, but not because of lack of ambition or ability, but because of a lack of character.
Clinton had all the ingredients of a great President: he was young, attractive, a good (if windy) public speaker, smart, quick-witted, a talented politician and a centrist. Unfortunately, he was (and is) a sociopath, a habitual liar (though a very talented one) and corrupt. By good luck and the dotcom boom, Clinton was able to eliminate the deficit briefly. He also, between his own obsessions and his Machiavellian wife, was enmeshed in scandal after scandal until the Monica Lewinsky mess tainted his Presidency. There is no question that, as with the Democrats and Donald Trump but to a lesser degree, Republicans were determined to “get” Clinton from the moment he was elected (as the plurality winner in a three-way election). There is also no question that it was Clinton who undid much of the repair work President Reagan had done on the prestige and public trust of the Presidency, and laid instead the foundation for the election, now twice, of Donald Trump. Before and without Clinton, I do not believe that someone with the background and personality traits of Trump would ever have been elevated to the office defined by Washington and Lincoln. Not only did Clinton corrupt his office, he corrupted his party, which felt forced to defend his slimy behavior against an impeachment by declaring, in essence, that all that matters for a President is whether the economy is good and the metaphorical trains run on time…that character doesn’t matter. Character doesn’t matter for the leader of a nation founded on ethical ideals that aims to be a role model for the world. Great. Thanks, Bill.
I believe that the hyper-partisanship, double standards, institutional distrust, cynicism and division that now threatens the nation began with Bill Clinton’s Presidency, and for that reason this is one of the times I feel like including Clinton among the candidates for Worst President Ever. Bubba goes into the finals because he deserves the indignity, even though he can’t possibly “win.”
The field is now Pierce, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Wilson, Nixon, Carter and Bill Clinton.
Aaaand let’s make it eight.
I feel that #43, George W. Bush’s disputed electoral vote win after the hanging-chad debacle in Florida handicapped his Presidency from the start. He had the era of international terrorism thrust onto our home shores on 9/11, immediately making his campaign talk about having a less intrusive and expensive foreign policy moot. Many Presidents have “what if?” next to their names, and one can easily imagine them having better (or worse) administrations in different periods of our history. The fact remains that Bush’s Presidency is distinguished, outside of the destruction of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon, by two disasters, one in foreign affairs and the other domestically: the Iraq War, and the junk mortgage meltdown that caused the Great Recession of 2008.
Add to those his administration’s covert acceptance of torture as an anti-terrorism tool (and using legal doubletalk to pretend that waterboarding didn’t count) and the insane tax cuts when the U.S. was expending excessive treasure in pursuing two wars at once, and the excesses and civil rights incursions imposed on Americans through the efforts of the new Department of Homeland Security. It is not a good record.
Clinton was the first President whose fanatic enemies were labeled as suffering from “derangement”; Bush was the second. The news media, which had been tending more and more to a leftward bias for decades, shifted in that direction harder than ever in the Bush II Presidency. Much of it was unfair, as in the scapegoating of his administration during the Katrina disaster, but who was responsible for appointing an incompetent FEMA director?
Bush didn’t play “President” especially well either; he was an even worse public speaker than his father, which was no mean feat, and rightly or wrongly always was haunted by the rumors that his V.P., Dick Cheney, was calling the shots.
Verdict: W has to join what is now the final 8. With Wilson and Clinton, he is the only other member of the group to serve two full terms. One would think that really bad Presidents wouldn’t get re-elected, wouldn’t one?
Barack Hussein Obama, #44 (2009-2017) is a perplexing case. Right now he is a wildly over-rated President, and given the overwhelming progressive bias in the academic ranks of historians, that false assessment is likely to be around for a while. It was under Obama, and in part because of him, that journalists almost completely abandoned objectivity and fairness. He joined the Democrats in conning and manipulating the nation into the “Affordable Care Act,” and lied outright to get it passed. Obama’s policies slowed what should have been a boom recovery from the 2008 crash; he was feckless and dithering in foreign policy, typified by his ludicrous “red line” threat regarding Syria.
A President who entered the White House creating hope that he would finally end racial tensions, he made them worse. Obama completed the transformation of the Attorney General’s office into a purely political and partisan position; he gave cover to incompetents and Machiavellian leftists. There was the Benghazi attack, the I.R.S. Tea Party group scandal, the ATF gunwalking fiasco, and more: like President Biden, but not to the same extent, President Obama kept loyal incompetents in office, assisted throughout by a lapdog news media. Obama’s racial favoritism, his inattention to illegal immigration, and his inability or refusal to seek compromise with the Republican Senate locked in grid-lock as the status quo. His arrogance and open disdain for white, religious, non-elite Americans launched the political career of Donald Trump.
Barack Obama has a lot to answer for. Nevertheless, Obama played the role of President as well as anyone since Ronald Reagan. He was an excellent speaker when he stuck to a script. His greatest accomplishment as President was getting elected twice as a black man—that, together with his maintenance and elevation of the image of the President takes him out of the running for Worst President Ever.
My reluctant Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.
Ironically, if I had finished this series a year ago as I intended to, Donald Trump’s time as President would have been “numbered, numbered, weighed, divided” resulting in a verdict here, while Joe Biden would have, by necessity and fairness, received an “incomplete.” That situation has reversed. Trump’s Presidency is continuing and must be regarded as unfinished, while that of #46, Joe Biden, has come crashing down in unprecedented fashion. I am not ready to say today that he has been the Worst President Ever, but Biden is unquestionably the most embarrassing President ever, as well as the most humiliated. President-Elect Trump is openly behaving as if he is already in office, and being treated by foreign leaders as if he is the President as well. Talk about breaching “democratic norms”—but nature abhors a vacuum and so does power. This would not be happening if Biden were capable of being President; a capable President wouldn’t allow it to happen.
Donald Trump must sit out the Worst President Ever battle, for his record is incomplete. Joe Biden, however, makes the finals. The candidates for Worst President Ever number nine: Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden.
The winner, and the reason for his title, will be revealed next week.
Your votes are welcome.
Need a review? Here are the links: Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
Ethics Alarms 
Personally, I think Bush II should be removed from the list and replaced with Obama. Bush II certainly had major failures, but I’m willing to grant him a bit of forgiveness in that he was the first president who confronted a serious threat from a non-state actor; under his watch, the rules of warfare changed pretty much forever. Yes, he made really bad decisions. But he was playing a new game.
I think you’re giving Obama far too much credit. Getting elected TWICE as a black man is reflective of only two things: his talent as an orator (one can read his speeches and quickly recognize that Obama’s skill was entirely in the delivery, not the message itself) and the fact that the nation desperately wanted to proclaim loudly to the world: “See, you assholes? We’re NOT a racist nation!” That’s not on Obama – it’s on us.
Despite this, he chose to fan the flames of the ignorant and set race relations in this nation back at least two generations. Maybe three. Can we not see Obama’s hand in the current anti-Semitism we see today, when the Middle East is one bad decision or accident away from starting World War Three? I cannot think of a president who had a better opportunity to move this nation – this world – forward and who sent it backwards anyway.
Oh, and he unleashed Joe Biden. Even Obama knew Biden was a disaster (“Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”) and essentially forced Biden’s hand in unleashing Trump 2.0. And in the meantime, the apparatchiks Obama put in place are the architects of the current geopolitical shitshow.
Obama, in my book, will prove the most destructive president in history, and thus the worst – and not by a little, if there’s anyone left to write the history. Biden, in my opinion, is the most incompetent – and thus number two. The nation needed someone who knew what they were doing. Instead, knowing his weaknesses, Obama’s machine gave us a guy who was a mediocrity in his prime – and he was long past his prime when his stuff (and Biden himself) were wheeled into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not to mention he is still butting in to this day. Another broken presidential norm.
I can see the argument. I did decide not to count what any of these guys did out of office, so Obama’s involvement with the Biden coup and his infliction on the public can’t be used against his record as President. You know I regard him as a terrible President in all respects but the symbolic one. Still, the symbolic aspect is important, as Trump refuses to learn.
I just was reminded of another one of Obama’s feckless-fests, when he dithered away the opportunity to support regime change in Iran.
And let John Kerry give the Iranians everything they wanted in the hope they’d be nice in return.
Why the hell is John Kerry still running around shooting off his mouth? That guy needs to be run out of town on a rai.
jvb
What I dislike most about President Obama is his arrogance and condescension when he speaks. He still does it, years after leaving office. President Clinton was arrogant as well, but it was different. Clinton, for all his faults, was very intelligent and an outstanding speaker. His speech on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is still a standard bearer for me. He didn’t come across as “superior in his own mind”…like President Obama. I would love to sit down and have lunch with him, though I disagree with him on almost every ideological issue. Even President Trump’s arrogance doesn’t equate. Barack Obama is in a class by himself.
I don’t necessarily agree with GW being a finalist for the worst President, but I can live with it because I’m pretty there are other finalists more deserving of the win.
On the grounds of being the most intentionally divisive president since easily the Founding – Barack Obama must be on the list. While the media bears the brunt of the responsibility creating the environment of profitable demonization of conservatives – Obama created a presidential persona around “half the country aren’t really good people”.
That alone is enough to guarantee a spot on the list.
I also don’t see a slam dunk argument for Bush II on the list other than I’m sure Jack at this point wants to keep an obviously Democrats-have-not-been-that-good-for-the-country list more bipartisan.
1. (Shhhhhhh!)
2. How many Presidents have both a collapsed economy and a costly war started under false pretenses on their records? Maybe James Madison?
That’s some hindsight bias. There was little reason to doubt the WMD intel. There currently is still plenty of reason to believe there were WMDs if even not perfectly matching the descriptions of contemporary intel analysis. But that’s the danger of intel. It’s never complete.
Never mind that. Saddam’s complete violation of the internationally *agreed to* and imposed raft of sanctions was enough to justify resumption of hostilities after the early 90s ceasefire.
It’s only a political argument whether or not to pursue.
Did Bush economic policies or did largely progressive economic policies lead to the financial collapse?
Before we say “presidents shoulder the blame of bad economies”, I was under the impression the list of “worst presidents” isn’t supposed to be based on perceptions but based on actuals.
My position has always been that the war was justified by Iraq’s breach of the cease-fire terms, but Bush framed it on the WMD provocation. That was stupid and reckless, and yes, politically ruinous. But wars have to be politically as well as substantively viable. Bush was also foolish to throw in the stuff about “besides, he tried to kill my father” line. That shifted the war into the category of a personal vendetta, even if he was mostly joking.
I think my comment here has been eaten.
Its hard to judge this objectively. We are still living in Bidan’s presidency. He may very well be the worst president so far, but how do I compare him to someone like Pierce when I’m so far connected from one and so closely connected to the other? It would almost seem better to judge them by eras then as a whole, at least, allowing to mitigate some form of bias.
Also, I think you’re talking about the 2008 crash. You said 2018 twice.
Fixed. I hate typos like that because I always miss numbers when I proofread. Thanks.
Jack,
I would love it if you were to publish a primer on the Presidents (yes, I know, you have SOO much spare time to work on these requests /sarc/). If you could take all of your essays, especially including these “Worst President Ever” but also including many of the amazing posts you have made on some of our best presidents, I would certainly be thrilled to read it. If it were a book, I would buy it and make it required reading for my children’s civics requirements.
My husband and I were just wishing for you to finish this last week. That you have written this installment feels like an early Christmas present. Thank you!
An interesting list, certainly. I believe that if you asked 100 people who the worst presidents were and why, you’d probably get 100 answers that would all differ at least slightly, although some common threads would run through them, and you’d get one group from conservative folks and another from liberal folks. I’m not sure I 100% agree with this list, but it’s the list you’ve given us to work with, so here are my thoughts:
Franklin Pierce – Had a life-long problem with alcohol, to the point where other military officers (yes, believe it or not he is one of the ten presidents who was a general) called him the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.” Tragic family history, and let grief and drink paralyze his single term in office.
James Buchanan – Took almost no steps to stop the Civil War from happening. Started to dislike the office to the point where he told Lincoln that if Lincoln was as happy upon assuming the presidency as he was upon leaving it, he was a happy man indeed.
Andrew Johnson – Never meant to be president, put on the ticket because he was a Democrat and a southerner. Couldn’t control the radical Republicans. Was impeached (probably unfairly) and came the closest any president ever came to removal from office. Also had the hardest act of all to follow.
Woodrow Wilson – Biggest racist ever to sit in the White House. Also probably one of the 3 or 4 most arrogant presidents. Led us into WW1 when we might not have needed to go, then alienated the world with his attempt to impose his own morality. Also alienated most of his political allies back home and was a willing participant in hiding that he had had a debilitating stroke from the country.
Richard Nixon – Popular president who didn’t trust his own popularity to take him past the finish line and overreached, then tried to cover it up.
Jimmy Carter – A creation of the media who was incompetent, arrogant, almost didn’t do the job, and brought the US to its weakest standing in the world in the second half of the 20th century. Would not have been elected had the US not been so fed up after Watergate that it didn’t really want a president, just a trustworthy pal.
Bill Clinton – Adulterer, perjurer, and the man who, as you say, laid the groundwork for Donald Trump, although he didn’t know he was doing it at the time.
George W. Bush – Assumed office under a shadow, then became, briefly, a hero after 9/11, then presided over a second term where everything fell to crap and he let it.
Joe Biden – Shouldn’t have won and shouldn’t have run, governed by lies, gaslighting, and hiding, until the fateful debate forced him from the race.
Well, the idea here is to winnow down a list of 9 to one winner, albeit an ignominious one. I think Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson should be the first to be removed, since they were dealing with almost impossible situations, the first because his son was killed in a horrible way right before he was to be President, the second because he was handed an almost impossible situation to handle and asked to step into the shoes of a near-saint.
I think I’ll remove GWB next. He tried to do the right thing and was pretty good at it for a while, until the Iraq war went south and the other side politicized Hurricane Katrina. Still, 20/20 hindsight. That takes us down to six.
I’ll let Jimmy Carter out because he wasn’t really up to the job and wasn’t intended to be. This doesn’t mean I don’t think he sucked, it just means he isn’t the worst of all.
That leaves Buchanan, Clinton, Wilson, Nixon, and Biden. The only reason I’m not going to put Clinton at the bottom is that his presidency was mostly successful and didn’t drag the US into any major external crises.
Nixon I won’t put at the absolute bottom because he achieved the greatest political comeback ever and I don’t think his political career, or he, should be defined only by the way things ended. So the three finalists are Buchanan, Wilson, and Biden.
The only reason I won’t put Buchanan at the bottom is that he was just incompetent, not actively doing wrong things, and I believe the fact that he was a very unhappy man for most of his life contributed to that. Still, the consequences of his non-action brought this nation very close to tearing itself apart.
Tough decision to make at the end here, between Wilson and Biden. Both tried to put a huge deception over on the American people about their own competence even to live, leave alone lead, but that alone isn’t enough, since they are not alone in that issue (Kennedy’s plethora of issues, Cleveland’s cancer).
Both were also hugely arrogant and acted on that arrogance, Wilson with the handling of WWI and what came after, Biden with the insistence on inflationary policy, the Afghan withdrawal, and the attempts to force electric vehicles.
Both also found themselves abandoned by almost everyone because of their actions. A president who stands alone is not an effective president. In all fairness, I’m not weighting Biden’s situation as heavily as Wilson’s because he was only abandoned when his debate performance made him undefendable. Wilson was just so arrogant and so peevish that he pushed EVERYONE away.
Both were also seriously deficient in character, Wilson with his racism and attempt to resegregate government in some areas and Biden with his disgusting behavior toward nearly every woman and girl who crossed his path. I’m not weighting Wilson’s racism as much as I might in a modern president, for it was still a common and accepted attitude in 1912 America, especially in a southerner.
In the end, I have to give the nod to Wilson, who might not have been quite as selfish as Biden, but who did more damage and whose influence continues today. He thought he could impose some great moral framework on the world, but he was only willing to do it his way, and his arrogance not only set the stage for the rise of the dictators and World War II but also the stage for artificial nations that weren’t mean to be to fall to pieces, with consequent damage. Czechoslovakia managed a peaceful divorce into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but the disintegration of Yugoslavia was a decade long dumpster fire, and we may yet see the disintegration of some of the nations created from what was the Ottoman Empire. Not only that, but it was his grandiose plans that sent both America and the nations it had aided into isolationism, and the Finns, the Chinese, the Austrians, the Czechs, and ultimately the Poles all paid the price as tyrants went unopposed.
I have to say that I think that Obama merits a dishonorable mention, for reasons you already set forth, and that Grover Cleveland also merits a dishonorable mention not only for concealing potentially deadly cancer but for what was probably a rape and for grooming a child to be his wife.
Disturbingly deft analysis: I was afraid you might scoop my grand finale, and you came mighty close. You’ll have to wait a bit, but excellent job Steve, as I expected.
“I was afraid you might scoop my grand finale…“
Are you planning to put Abraham Lincoln on both lists?
Steve-O,
Excellent work! With your comments on Wilson, I have to ask…have you read David Andelman’s book “A Shattered Peace”, which deals with the end of WWI, Woodrow Wilson, the Versailles Treaty, and its far-reaching effects?
Years ago, when I was writing my this-day-in-history blog, Andelman pinged me after I wrote a piece on Versailles and thought I might be interested in his book. I picked it up, read it, and found it fascinating.
Your knowledge of the subjects suggests there might not be a lot for you to learn from the book, but I mention it nonetheless.
I don’t believe I have. I might take a look, however..
Thanks for the pointer. I’ve read ‘1919’ by Margaret MacMillan, which was quite good, but it sounds like this books goes a couple steps further. I will probably give it a whirl.
I put this book on hold at my local library and picked it up today. I’m looking forward to reading it. Thank you for the recommendation.
You’re welcome. I would love to read any thoughts you – or Diego or Steve-O (if they’re able to read it) – have regarding the book.
Nicely done, and well deserved kudos from our Ethicist in Chief. High praise, indeed.
jvb
I remember thinking Bill Clinton was the first Baby Boom generation president and hoping something good would come out of his ascension. He’d be the first Rock and Roll president. Boy, was I ever wrong. He and Hillary and all the Clintonistas are an embarrassment to Baby Boomers everywhere, who, I have to admit, are an embarrassment.
James Buchanan has LONG been my vote for worst president of the US, and I can’t see anyone else coming close to dethroning him.
My reason is very simple:
No other US president in history has ever contributed more to a potential US dissolution.
Buchanan’s actions (and inactions) contributed immensely to the starting of the American Civil War. While the casus belli of the war, not to mention the underlying causes, obviously are not attributable to Buchanan directly, a superior president could have and would have acted differently, potentially avoiding a war, or at the least mitigating elements of it.
It’s true he was dealt a supremely bad hand in history. But he also used his bad hand in the worst ways possible…
Not to telegraph my final four, but I have come to believe that neither Pierce nor Buchanan, as useless and impotent as they were, could have prevented the Civil War from 1852 going forward. I think the slavery vs abolition breach was too far gone by then. Donald Trump has opined that a President like Andrew Jackson might have turned the tide: I’m admirer of Jackson’s leadership abilities, but I doubt it.
When I was beginning to study the Presidents when I was about 9 years old, the conventional wisdom was that Buchanan, A. Johnson, Harding and Grant were Presidential failures. Over time historians have been more sympathetic to Warren G and Ulysses S., but Buchanan and Johnson have remained at the bottom. I’m pretty sure both of them were in a hopeless position, and to be the worst of the worst, I think a failed President had to have a chance.
Well, that is a very convincing line: “ to be the worst of the worst the president had to actually have a chance”
in other words, your ultimate metric is not “which president contributed to the absolute worst disasters that befell the US”
but rather,
”which president turned opportunity/good times into avoidable problems by the largest margin”
?
A bit more than that: I’m going to posit several categories in the final post. But the worst President has to have done actual damage. I’m not convinced Buchanan made anything worse than it would have been with a better leader. Few historians are either. Are you?
Yes!
My view is that Buchanan SPED UP the start of the war!
As I wrote above, while I agree he was dealt a bad hand, he ALSO played that hand very poorly.
I don’t believe history is entirely deterministic. that is, I think historians saying that ‘virtually any other president in his shoes would not have mitigated or delayed or avoided The Civil War’ is essentially just showing us those historians biases.
But all in all, I agree that even our best presidents would have struggled with the situation.
Speeding up the Civil War might have been a good thing.
in a post a few yrs back you convincingly state that speeding up (i.e., getting to the resolution) of an already STARTED war is a good thing.
But I don’t think that speeding up the launch of a war that hasn’t yet begun is wise, generally speaking.
Many seemingly inevitable wars have been delayed, and then never happened (e.g., a land war in Europe during the Cold War…among plenty of others).
Given that history isnt deterministic, and that it was theoretically possible to avoid the Civil war if further delay had happened, Buchanan’s speeding up of it ain’t a good thing, in my judgment.
I’ve always been grateful that he didn’t solve the problem by telling the South to go ahead and secede. They had the better legal argument, and Buchanan had said that if they did secede, the US couldn’t legally stop them. He delayed the inevitable long enough for someone with guts to take over.
This has been a fascinating read, top to bottom. Kudos!! It’s another reason I love this site.
What Joel said.
PWS
My thinking for a while, is that likely the group most liable for precipitating the onset of the war in 1861 were the southern firebrands who sabotaged the Democratic convention.
That split the party and ensured that there would not be a national Democratic presidential candidate in 1860. In turn, this pretty much guaranteed Lincoln’s election which was the pretext for the first batch of secessions.
It’s not to say that Lincoln might not have won anyway — the Republican party was young and had a lot of momentum coming into the election, but it would have been a lot closer. As well, perhaps we don’t have the fourth party, and just have a head to head race.
On the gripping hand, if memory serves, Lincoln did win a majority of the total votes in almost all the states that he won, so that’s a vote for him winning anyway.
But the way the election unfolded, I think the worst case for Lincoln would be that it went to the House. That actually could have been bad for him — the vote there would have been with the House that was elected in 1858. I don’t recall the composition of that one.