Despite being Polk's home state and the state he once served as the governor of, Tennessee voted for the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, over Democratic candidate James K. Polk. Clay won Tennessee by a very narrow margin of 123 votes (0.10%). James K. Polk is one of 4 presidents to lose his residential state in a successful presidential bid. The others are Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Donald Trump in 2016.
This election marked the third time consecutively that Polk had lost a statewide election in Tennessee. The previous two where in the 1841 and 1843 gubernatorial elections.[1][2]