Well they did get a choice when Doc Emmitt Brown, I mean Robert La Follette, ran.
Davis may have been the wrong kind of conservative, pro-segregation, against women’s suffrage (though maybe that WAS a bad idea, haha just kidding ladies). Still better than a commie though. Major fluke, the last one before him was Alton Parker right? Or was he not that conservative?
Yes, Davis wasn’t exactly “Conservative” in a way we’d consider favorable today on some of those issues. He was more of a Bourbon throwback. Of course, segregation was a mainstream plank for the Democrats (and it was, after all, the left-wing Wilson who reimplemented it in DC, doing more than a small number to all those Black Republican government employees who were about as close to being fully assimilated into society as one could get in those days).
As for Judge Alton Parker, he was somewhat harder to pin down (Wikipedia would call him a Conservative, but he seemed a bit of a mix — and the Dems were trying to unite the Bryan left and the Cleveland center-right). I’d call him a moderate, but he did repudiate the nutty free silverites and told the party he’d walk if they forced him to not support the Gold Standard. In that regard, he was clearly closer to the Cleveland Bourbonites.
It’s funny that Theodore Roosevelt was somewhat fearful of Parker’s candidacy, he thought because Parker hadn’t taken a strong stance on the issues of the day, that would have a strong appeal to the electorate. Of course, knowing what I know now about TR, I’d have probably cast a protest vote for Parker (not so in 1924, as I would’ve proudly voted for Coolidge).