The United States presidential election of 1936 was the 38th quadrennial
presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 1936. In terms of electoral
votes, it was the most lopsided presidential election in the history of
the United States. In terms of the popular vote, it was the second-biggest
victory for the winner since the election of 1820, which was not
seriously contested. The election took place as the Great
Depression entered its eighth year. Incumbent President and Democratic
candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt was still working to push the provisions of
his New Deal economic policy through Congress and the courts. However, the
New Deal policies he had already enacted, such as Social Security and
unemployment benefits, had proven to be highly popular with most Americans.
Roosevelt's Republican opponent was Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, a
political moderate. Although some political pundits
predicted a close race, Roosevelt went on to win the greatest electoral
landslide since the beginning of the current two-party system in the 1850s.
Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont, which together could
only return 8 electoral votes. By winning 523 electoral votes, Roosevelt
received 98.49% of the electoral vote, the highest percentage since the
uncontested election of 1820. Roosevelt also won the largest number of electoral
votes ever recorded at that time, so far only surpassed by Ronald Reagan in the
election of 1984, when there were 7 more electoral votes available to contest. In
addition, Roosevelt won 60.8% of the national popular vote, the second
highest popular-vote percentage won since 1820.
Nominations = Democratic Party nomination =
President Roosevelt faced only one primary opponent other than various
favorite sons. Henry Skillman Breckinridge, an anti-New Deal lawyer
from New York, filed to run against Roosevelt in four primaries.
Breckinridge's challenge of the popularity of the New Deal among
Democrats failed miserably. In New Jersey, President Roosevelt did not file
for the preference vote and lost that primary to Breckinridge, even though he
did receive 19% of the vote on write-ins. Roosevelt's candidates for
delegates swept the race in New Jersey and elsewhere. In other primaries,
Breckinridge's best showing was 15% in Maryland. Overall, Roosevelt received
93% of the primary vote, compared to 2% for Breckinridge.
The Democratic Party Convention was held in Philadelphia between July 23 and 27.
The delegates unanimously re-nominated incumbents President Roosevelt and
Vice-President John Nance Garner. At Roosevelt's request, the two-thirds
rule, which had given the South a veto power, was repealed.
= Republican Party nomination = The 1936 Republican National Convention
was held in Cleveland, Ohio, between June 9 and 12. Although many candidates
sought the Republican nomination, only two, Governor Landon and Senator William
Borah of Idaho, were considered to be serious candidates. While favorite sons
County Attorney Earl Warren of California, Governor Warren Green of
South Dakota, and Stephen A. Day of Ohio won their respective primaries, the
70-year-old Borah, a well-known progressive and "insurgent," won the
Wisconsin, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Oregon primaries, while
also performing quite strongly in Knox's Illinois and Green's South Dakota. The
party machinery almost uniformly backed Landon, however, a wealthy businessman
and centrist, who won primaries in Massachusetts and New Jersey and
dominated in the caucuses and at state party conventions.
With Knox withdrawing to become Landon's selection for vice-president and Day,
Green, and Warren releasing their delegates, the tally at the convention
was as follows: Alf Landon 984
William Borah 19 = Other nominations =
Many people expected Huey Long, the colorful Democratic senator from
Louisiana, to run as a third-party candidate with his "Share Our Wealth"
program as his platform. However, he was assassinated in September 1935. Some
historians, including Long biographer T. Harry Williams, contend that Long had
never, in fact, intended to run for the presidency in 1936. Instead, he had been
plotting with Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist talk radio
personality, to run someone else on the soon-to-be-formed "Share Our Wealth"
Party ticket. According to Williams, the idea was that this candidate would split
the left-wing vote with President Roosevelt, thereby electing a Republican
president and proving the electoral appeal of Share Our Wealth. Long would
then wait four years and run for president as a Democrat in 1940.
Prior to Long's death, leading contenders for the role of the
sacrificial 1936 candidate included Senators Burton K. Wheeler and William
Borah, and Governor Floyd B. Olson of the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party. After
the assassination, however, the two senators lost interest in the idea and
Olson was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.
Father Coughlin, who had allied himself with Dr. Francis Townsend, a left-wing
political activist who was pushing for the creation of an old-age pension
system, and Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, was eventually forced to run Congressman
William Lemke as the candidate of the newly created "Union Party". Lemke, who
lacked the charisma and national stature of the other potential candidates, fared
poorly in the election, barely managing 2% of the vote, and the party was
dissolved the following year. William Dudley Pelley, Chief of the
Silver Shirts Legion, ran on the ballot for the Christian Party in Washington
State, but won fewer than 2,000 votes. General election
= Campaign = Landon proved to be an ineffective
campaigner who rarely traveled. Most of the attacks on FDR and Social Security
were developed by Republican campaigners rather than Landon himself. In the two
months after his nomination he made no campaign appearances. As columnist
Westbrook Pegler lampooned, "Considerable mystery surrounds the
disappearance of Alfred M. Landon of Topeka, Kansas.... The Missing Persons
Bureau has sent out an alarm bulletin bearing Mr. Landon's photograph and
other particulars, and anyone having information of his whereabouts is asked
to communicate direct with the Republican National Committee."
Landon respected and admired Roosevelt and accepted much of the New Deal but
objected that it was hostile to business and involved too much waste and
inefficiency. Late in the campaign, Landon accused Roosevelt of corruption –
that is, of acquiring so much power that he was subverting the Constitution:
The President spoke truly when he boasted... "We have built up new
instruments of public power." He spoke truly when he said these instruments
could provide "shackles for the liberties of the people... and...
enslavement for the public". These powers were granted with the
understanding that they were only temporary. But after the powers had been
obtained, and after the emergency was clearly over, we were told that another
emergency would be created if the power was given up. In other words, the
concentration of power in the hands of the President was not a question of
temporary emergency. It was a question of permanent national policy. In my
opinion the emergency of 1933 was a mere excuse.... National economic
planning—the term used by this Administration to describe its
policy—violates the basic ideals of the American system.... The price of
economic planning is the loss of economic freedom. And economic freedom
and personal liberty go hand in hand. This election is notable for The
Literary Digest poll, which was based on 10 million questionnaires mailed to
readers and potential readers; 2.3 million were returned. The Literary
Digest, which had correctly predicted the winner of the last 5 elections,
announced in its October 31 issue that Landon would be the winner with 370
electoral votes. The cause of this mistake has often been attributed to
improper sampling: more Republicans subscribed to the Literary Digest than
Democrats, and were thus more likely to vote for Landon than Roosevelt. However,
a 1976 article in The American Statistician demonstrates that the
actual reason for the error was that the Literary Digest relied on voluntary
responses. As the article explains, the 2.3 million "respondents who returned
their questionnaires represented only that subset of the population with a
relatively intense interest in the subject at hand, and as such constitute
in no sense a random sample... it seems clear that the minority of
anti-Roosevelt voters felt more strongly about the election than did the
pro-Roosevelt majority." A more detailed study in 1988 showed that both the
initial sample and non-response bias were contributing factors, and that the
error due to the initial sample taken alone would not have been sufficient to
predict the Landon victory. This mistake by the Literary Digest proved to be
devastating to the magazine's credibility, and in fact the magazine
went out of existence within a few months of the election.
That same year, George Gallup, an advertising executive who had begun a
scientific poll, predicted that Roosevelt would win the election, based
on a quota sample of 50,000 people. He also predicted that the Literary Digest
would mis-predict the results. His correct predictions made public opinion
polling a critical element of elections for journalists and indeed for
politicians. The Gallup Poll would become a staple of future presidential
elections, and remains one of the most prominent election polling
organizations. Results
Roosevelt won by a landslide, carrying 46 of the 48 states and bringing in many
additional Democratic members of Congress. After fellow Democrat Lyndon
Johnson's 61.1% share of the popular vote in 1964, Roosevelt's 60.8% is the
second-largest percentage in U.S. history since the nearly unopposed
election of James Monroe in 1820, and his 98.5% of the electoral vote is the
highest in two-party competition. Roosevelt won the largest number of
electoral votes ever recorded at that time, so far only surpassed by Ronald
Reagan in 1984, when 7 more electoral votes were available to contest. Landon
became the second official major-party candidate since the current system was
established to win fewer than ten electoral votes by tying fellow
Republican William Howard Taft, who won 8 votes in his 1912 re-election
campaign. No major-party candidate has won so few electoral votes since this
election. The closest anyone has come was Reagan's 1984 opponent, Walter
Mondale, who only won 13 electoral votes.
Of the 3,095 counties/independent cities making returns, Roosevelt won in 2,634
while Landon carried 461. Some political pundits predicted the
Republicans, whom many voters blamed for the Great Depression, would soon become
an extinct political party. However, the Republicans would make a strong comeback
in the 1938 congressional elections and would remain a potent force in Congress,
although they were not able to win the presidency again until 1952.
The Electoral College results, in which Landon only won Maine and Vermont,
inspired Democratic Party chairman James Farley, who had in fact declared during
the campaign that FDR was to lose only these two states, to amend the
then-conventional political wisdom of "As Maine goes, so goes the nation" into
"As goes Maine, so goes Vermont." Additionally, a prankster posted a sign
on Vermont's border with New Hampshire the day after the 1936 election,
reading: "You are now leaving the United States." Some of Roosevelt's advisers
even joked that America's fiscal woes might be best solved if he offered to
sell Vermont and Maine to Canada. As of 2012, even after many years as a
classic "blue" state that usually supports Democratic presidential
candidates, Vermont has voted for more Republican presidential nominees than
any other state. From 1856 through 1960, Vermont gave the state's electoral votes
to the Republican Party nominee in every presidential election. No other state
has voted so many times in a row for candidates of the same political party.
Maine once held a similar political record. From 1856 through 1960, Maine
voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election but one.
Another state that had been reliably Republican for a very long time up to
1936 was Pennsylvania. Roosevelt was the first Democrat to carry Pennsylvania
since "favorite son" James Buchanan did so in 1856.
Source: Leip, David. 1936 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of
U.S. Presidential Elections. Source: Electoral College Box Scores
1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives..
= Results by state = = Close states =
Margin of victory less than 5%: New Hampshire, 1.75%
Margin of victory between 5% and 10%: Kansas, 7.72%
Massachusetts, 9.46% Delaware, 9.77%
= Geography of Results = Cartographic Gallery
See also History of the United States
United States Senate elections, 1936 Second inauguration of Franklin D.
Roosevelt References
Further reading Andersen, Kristi. The Creation of a
Democratic Majority: 1928–1936, statistical
Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
Communist Party USA, The Communist Election Platform, 1936. New York:
Workers Library Publishers, 1936. Fadely, James Philip. "Editors, Whistle
Stops, and Elephants: the Presidential Campaign of 1936 in Indiana." Indiana
Magazine of History 1989 85(2): 101–137. ISSN 0019-6673
Leuchtenburg, William E. "Election of 1936", in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
ed., A History of American Presidential Elections vol 3, analysis and primary
documents McCoy, Donald. Landon of Kansas
Nicolaides, Becky M. "Radio Electioneering in the American
Presidential Campaigns of 1932 and 1936," Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television, June 1988, Vol. 8 Issue 2, pp. 115–138
Savage, Sean J. "The 1936-1944 Campaigns," in William D. Pederson, ed.
A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt pp 96–113 online
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. The Politics of Upheaval
External links 1936 popular vote by counties
How close was the 1936 election? – Michael Sheppard, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Election of 1936 in Counting the Votes
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