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Arguably the rift created within the Republican Party allowed the Democrats to win nation-wide elections for the first time since the ACW making the room for Wi
by morelisp 4y ago
Arguably the rift created within the Republican Party allowed the Democrats to win nation-wide elections for the first time since the ACW making the room for Wilson to do this; it's not a very good legacy for a progressive campaigner though. (And the article is weak on it either way.)
- gostsamo 4y agoI don't know the history around those elections, but Wilson is mentioned to win over 400 electoral votes. Here the majority system hides if the republicans were that bad overall or the three way split was always to the benefit of the democrats, but if the latter, I'd tend to agree.
- Jtsummers 4y agoWikipedia includes a breakdown by state so you can see by what percentage Wilson won in each state at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidentia.... He didn't have the majority in most states he won and didn't even have the majority of the popular vote overall. His lowest winning percentage was 32.08% in Idaho. Beating out Taft by a bit over 1%, Taft had 31.02% of the vote. His margin against Taft was not substantial in many of the states where he didn't have the majority, so depending on who Roosevelt took votes from (likely more Taft voters than Wilson voters) the election could have been substantially different.
- drewcoo 4y agoI sincerely doubt that the formation of the Bull Moose party had much to do with this trip. The new party did split the Republican vote, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_Stat...