Since white manhood suffrage became a thing in the 1830s into 1840s, no, there hasn't been a presidential election like that as far as we are aware. "As far as we are aware" is going to be limited, though. We don't have scientific polls from 1836 or 1912, so it's nigh on impossible for us to have a really good handle on how people overall seemed to be making vote decisions.

Since scientific polling was introduced in the 1940s or 1950s, though, partisanship has always been the primary or a primary factor in (seeming to) determine people's vote decisions. The old line from The American Voter, which is at most only kinda true these days, is that partisanship acts at the center of a funnel of causality, where lots of other forces either affect partisanship or are interpreted through partisanship. We've seen some rise in more clearly issue-based voting and some mass movement away from partisanship in general, but it's still the king like it's always been.

There have been a whole bunch of lower elections where that was true, though. The best example is the one-party South from the end of Reconstruction through the Voting Rights Act. When everyone is a Democrat, party doesn't matter in state or congressional elections, and you don't have much choice but to learn about policies or be lost.

Thing is, though, politics in the one-party south were, to be technical, busted. Real bad. This was not a time and place of deep civic virtue and well-considered policies. This was a time and place of profound and widespread corruption, of an inability of voters to know who to kick out when things went wrong, and so on. Because covid, I can't go get juicy quotes from Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, but the general terribleness of one-party, effectively nonpartisan, government is a key (ha!) point of his book. Another is that the few southern states with reasonably effective politics had those because they had enduring, easily-identifiable factions within the Democratic party that people could choose between... effectively, parties in all but name. You can see some of this extended to the modern era with Wright and Schaffner's take on Nebraska's nonpartisan state legislature, where on of their key findings is that nonpartisanship makes it effectively impossible for voters to discipline their legislature.

Washington warned about parties because, like anyone in the 1790s, he had no idea how to construct a workable mass democracy because nobody had ever tried to do that -- and wouldn't even start trying until the 1830s. One of the biggest answers has been long-lasting, strong, diverse parties, and the mass partisanship that goes with that. Schattschneider's ancient take in Party Government is woefully outdated, being from the 1940s, but the basic gist of his argument is still okay. The big takeaway quote that I'll probably mess up a little -- political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save for parties -- is still true.