The LOTE principle dates back at least as far as Aristotle, who wrote in Nicomachean Ethics: “For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good.” (Aristotle was a fan, it seems, but I’m pretty sure he never had to watch Trump and Biden face off twice.) LOTE voting has been around since the founding fathers, but, according to Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the National Museum of American History, it really became notable about 60 years into our Republic. “The 1830s and 1840s are the period when we get a really strong two-party system, which supercharges the lesser of two evils thinking,” Grinspan says. “After the 1830s, the concept of two parties at war with each other puts a rigid scaffolding around ‘lesser of two evils’ logic for an individual candidate.”
LOTE voting is a mark of cultural dissatisfaction. For that reason, the 1840s and ’50s were big times for nose-holding, given that Americans were so divided that they would soon go to war with each other. It wasn’t just the parties that changed, though, according to historians. “Both parties fielded supremely unmemorable candidates, and the elections focused on who would do less harm,” says Dr. Lindsay Chernivsky, presidential historian and author of Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic, describing the elections of the 1840s and ’50s. “While they didn’t necessarily use the language ‘lesser of two evils,’ many Northerners focused on who would either limit the spread of the evils of slavery, while Southerners looked for candidates that would not interfere in slavery, often using rhetoric about the evils of government interference.” (Some people, though, did use the LOTE language. Here’s Charles Sumner on the election in 1848, before he became a Radical Republican senator: “I hear the old saw that ‘we must take the least of two evils’…for myself, if two evils are presented to me, I will take neither.”)
These trends came to a head in the election of 1860. As Grinspan says, “It’s ironic, as he’s considered one of the best presidents in US history, but Abraham Lincoln was quite unpopular when he was elected. He was heavily criticized for being both not enough of an abolitionist and too much of an abolitionist; he won less than 40 percent of the vote in a four-way race. Still, enough voters did not want secession that Lincoln became the nose-holding choice for a qualifying number of voters.”