In the election on the sixth of November Lincoln carried all the Northern states except New Jersey, receiving 180 electoral votes. Douglas got only 12 electoral votes, from Missouri and New Jersey. Bell carried Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, with 39 votes. And Breckinridge got the 72 votes of the rest of the Southern states. But the electoral vote does not tell the story of the election. Douglas polled a very large popular vote in all the states of the North. He received 1,370,000 votes to Lincoln's 1,860,000 and would have easily won with the support of the united Democratic party.

The conflict between Buchanan and Douglas took its toll on the Democratic party. When the nominating convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, a hotbed of secessionist sentiments, it met for a record ten days without being able to name a presidential candidate. The convention went through 59 ballots, was disrupted twice by the withdrawal of southern delegates, and then adjourned for six weeks. Meeting again, this time in Baltimore, the Democrats acknowledged their irreparable division by naming two candidates in two separate conventions.

The entire popular vote for Lincoln was 1,858,200; that for Douglas, giving him his share of the fusion vote, 1,276,780; that for Breckinridge, giving him his share of the fusion vote, 812,500; and that for Bell, including his proportion of the fusion vote, 735,504. The whole vote against Lincoln was thus 2,824,874, showing a clear aggregate majority against him of nearly a million of votes.