Posted on 05/15/2009 6:14:07 PM PDT by glock rocks
... and south of I-84 ...
Oh, yes! Yes!
Seems we’ll find out just how smart Jr is...
I don’t think he was a known to be a super rino until after he won. I was unaware of it until this year. Before I thought he was just a boring squish.
“The 1912 election makes for interesting reading because you can determine not just which states were the most Republican at the time, but which were the most conservative”
Which non-Southern states were the most conservative at at least.
Utah gave the highest vote % to Taft 37.46. Followed very closely by New Hampshire 37.43 which Wilson narrowly won, it would have been funny if Taft had lost the state that gave him the highest%. And then Vermont 37.13.
Then New Mexico 35.91. Connecticut 35.88. Oklahoma 35.77. (No TR on the ballot, the rest of the vote was for Wilson and Debs the Socialist) Rhode Island 35.56.
Oh New England former conservative bedrock.
I read somewhere that Wilson ran as a conservative democrat (liar).
TR by this time was out of his gourd and publicly at least to the left of Wilson. Wilson for example was against the minimum wage that the bull mousers were for. But he turned out to be our first true socialist President.
TR only ran as a third party candidate because he had an ego the size of the titanic. After he saw just how much damage Wilson was doing to the country, he returned to the Republican fold and promised to campaign for whoever the Republicans could get that was capable of defeating Wilson. That turned out to be Associate Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes. He put up a very good fight and almost unseated Wilson, but fell short. If he had been able to carry California or pick off a few allegedly "conservative" southern states who blindly voted the socialist incumbent, he would have won.
Incidentally, not all of the south was a one-party system at the time. In some deep southern states like South Carolina, the Dems had a one-party dictatorship racking up as many votes as Saddam in his heyday (Wilson got 96% in SC), but others were competitive. For example in Tennessee, the anti-Wilson vote made up 48% of the electorate, and Taft came in 2nd place, as more of them of the anti-Wilson voters were conservatives.
1912 Presidential General Election Results - Tennessee
Wilson/Marshall Democrat 133,021 52.80%
Taft/Butler Republican 60,475 24%
Roosevelt/Johnson Progressive 54,041 21%
1912 Presidential General Election Results - Arkansas
Wilson/Marshall Democrat 68,814 55.01%
Taft/Butler Republican 25,585 20.45%
Roosevelt/Johnson Progressive 21,644 17.30%
Debs/Seidel Socialist 8,153 6.52%
1912 Presidential General Election Results - West Virginia Wilson/Marshall Democrat 113,197 42.11%
Roosevelt/Johnson Progressive 79,112 29.43%
Taft/Butler Republican 56,754 21.11%
Debs/Seidel Socialist 15,248 5.67%
West Virginia is the most interesting to me. Later in the 20th century, it became a pretty reliable Dem vote in Presidential elections (a pattern not broken until Bush in 2000, and the GOP-trend is now permanent). But back in 1912, 58% of west Virginians OPPOSED Wilson. Republicans would have won that state in a two-way race on the ballot. The odd thing is that TR was much more popular than Taft in West Virigia, something that would be the opposite today because the state is very culturally conservative. My guess is that social issues weren't nearly as big an impact as they were in 1912 (the big social fights back then being over the evils of alcohol and so on), and the blue-collar union vote back then was probably at is peak -- hence alot of anti-Wilsonites who were "progressive" and voted Teddy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.