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| Elections in Texas |
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The 1924 United States presidential election in Texas took place on November 4, 1924, as part of the 1924 United States presidential election. State voters chose 20 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Ever since statehood, Texas had been very nearly the strongest state for the Democratic Party owing to its initial history being as a Deep South state based around slavery. Even during Reconstruction when African-Americans were briefly enfranchised, the Republican Party won just one statewide election, and after Redemption and the passing of a new constitution in 1876 the GOP became confined largely to areas of abolitionist German refugee settlement in the Hill Country,[1] and to a few South Texas counties where local Republican bosses could until 1920 outcompete their Democratic equivalents.[2] The Terrell Election Law created a poll tax that, from 1902, disenfranchised virtually all remaining African-American voters, the vast majority of Mexican Americans, and also most poor whites.[3] Voter turnout among males over twenty-one fell from over eighty percent to under thirty percent following the poll tax.[4]
The period following this disfranchisement nonetheless saw a considerable amount of typically "Progressive" reform under Governors James Stephen Hogg and Thomas M. Campbell, and despite this progressive faction ceding power in 1906 to the conservatives, Texas proved solid in its support for progressive candidate Woodrow Wilson at the 1912 Democratic National Convention.[5] Another populist, James Ferguson, took the governorship in 1914 on an anti-Prohibition platform, but was impeached for misappropriation of public funds[6]
The 1916 presidential election had seen Democrat Woodrow Wilson establish firmer control over the machine-dominated areas of South Texas, but hostility towards Wilson's peace promises caused some losses amongst the German population.[7] Later Wilson became hated by German and Irish Americans for his entry into the war, his role in drafting the Treaty of Versailles and supporting many anti-German groups during the "Red Scare".[8] His League of Nations proposal was also opposed in the South where isolationism had long been very powerful,[9] but the reaction was much less pronounced than in Acadiana or the Ozarks.[9]
At the beginning of the campaign, the victory in the tantamount-to-election Democratic primary for Governor of Miriam A. Ferguson in opposition to the powerful Ku Klux Klan produced substantial doubt about whether Democratic nominee John W. Davis of West Virginia would maintain even James M. Cox’s reduced vote share from 1920,[10] with suggestions some of her supporters would back incumbent Republican president Calvin Coolidge or Progressive nominee Robert M. La Follette.
Texas had been a Democratic stronghold since it first became a state in 1845, and the first poll taken in early October had Davis winning 56 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Coolidge and 10 percent for La Follette, which constituted a slight decrease on Cox’s already reduced majority four years previously.[11] As it turned out, however, the conservative Southern Democrat Davis restored pre-existing Democratic hegemony in most of Texas, improving upon Cox‘s 1920 vote by fourteen percent and even exceeding Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 performance, whilst Coolidge fell four percent below what Warren G. Harding managed. Although La Follette would carry his home state of Wisconsin and relegate Davis to third in eleven other states, amongst Texas’ poll-tax-restricted electorate his appeal was almost entirely restricted to German Texans who were more culturally allied to the Midwest than to the South. Texas would be La Follette’s sixteenth-weakest state nationally, but overwhelmingly German Gillespie and Comal Counties would be the only counties in antebellum slave states to be won by La Follette. In fact, in Comal County La Follette received 73.96 percent of the vote, his highest proportion in any county nationwide.[12]
