Global Information1916 United States presidential election information
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531 members of the Electoral College 266 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 61.8%[1]  2.8 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Presidential election results map. Blue denotes those won by Wilson/Marshall, red denotes states won by Hughes/Fairbanks. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 1916 United States presidential election was the 33rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1916. Incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson narrowly defeated former associate justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate.
In June, the 1916 Republican National Convention chose Hughes as a compromise between the conservative and progressive wings of the party. Hughes was on the Supreme Court in 1912 and was not involved in the bitter politics of that year. He defeated John W. Weeks, Elihu Root, and several other candidates on the third ballot. While conservative and progressive Republicans had been divided in the 1912 election between the candidacies of incumbent President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt, they largely united around Hughes in his bid to oust Wilson. Hughes remains, as of today, the only person to have served as a Supreme Court justice and later been a major party's presidential nominee. Wilson was re-nominated at the 1916 Democratic National Convention, as was Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, both without opposition. Hughes's running mate was Charles W. Fairbanks, who had been Theodore Roosevelt's vice president in his second term.
The campaign took place against a background dominated by war — the Mexican Revolution and World War I. Although officially neutral in the European conflict, public opinion in the United States favored the Allied forces led by Great Britain and France against the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, due to the harsh treatment of civilians by the German Army and the militaristic character of the German and Austrian monarchies.[2] Despite their sympathy for the Allied forces, most American voters wanted to avoid involvement in the war and preferred to continue a policy of neutrality. Wilson's campaign used the popular slogans "He kept us out of war" and "America First" to appeal to those voters who wanted to avoid a war in Europe or with Mexico.[3][4][5] Hughes criticized Wilson for not taking the "necessary preparations" to face a conflict.[6]
Although many saw Hughes as the favorite to win, Wilson after a hard-fought contest defeated him by nearly 600,000 votes out of about 18.5 million cast in the popular vote. Wilson secured a narrow majority in the Electoral College by sweeping the Solid South and winning several swing states with razor-thin margins. Wilson won California, the decisive state, by just 3,773 votes. Since the GOP was not as split as in 1912, Wilson did not have the same easy victory as he had four years earlier, losing his home state of New Jersey along with the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Marshall's home state of Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia (although he still won an electoral vote from the state), and Wisconsin. However, Wilson still managed to win two states that he had lost in 1912 (Utah and Washington), and fully won California after having only obtained two out of 13 electoral votes from California in 1912.
Wilson became the first candidate to win election while losing both Pennsylvania and New York (Harry Truman and George W. Bush would later do the same). It was the first election since 1892 in which a Democrat was elected to a second term, and the first since 1832 in which a Democrat was elected to a consecutive second term. The United States entered the war in April 1917, one month after Wilson's second term began.
- ^ "National General Election VEP Turnout Rates, 1789-Present". United States Election Project. CQ Press.
- ^ Frederick Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (1974), pp. 57–98.
- ^ "Wilson for 'America First'" Archived February 2, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, The Chicago Daily Tribune (October 12, 1915).
- ^ Cooper, John Milton. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, p. 278 (Vintage Books, 2011).
- ^ Garrett, Garet. Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939–1942, p. 13 (Caxton Press 2003).
- ^ John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (1974), p. 164.