TMP (@Cleisthenes)

There was actually a very prominent conspiracy theory of yesteryear, though now largely forgotten but that I believe to be true, that Washington didn't even win the first Presidential election. John Adams did. However, the Electoral College felt that Washington, a war hero and from the most populous and prosperous state in the new United States, Virginia, was the correct choice to hold the Republic together feeling that Adams was too obnoxious and disliked (by the elites who never liked him going back to the Continental Congresses) to be the head of the Executive branch in the crucial first years of the new nation.