Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 1912. The Democratic ticket of governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey and governor Thomas Marshall of Indiana defeated the Republican ticket of incumbent President William Howard Taft and university president Nicholas Butler, while also defeating the Progressive/"Bull Moose" ticket of former president Theodore Roosevelt and governor Hiram Johnson of California, and the Socialist Party ticket of former Indiana state representative Eugene V. Debs and Milwaukee mayor Emil Seidel.
Roosevelt served as president from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican, and Taft succeeded him with his support. Taft's conservatism angered Roosevelt, so he challenged Taft for the party nomination at the 1912 Republican National Convention. When Taft and his conservative allies narrowly prevailed, Roosevelt rallied his progressive supporters and launched a third-party bid. At the Democratic Convention, Wilson won the presidential nomination on the 46th ballot, defeating Speaker of the House Champ Clark and several other candidates with the support of William Jennings Bryan and other progressive Democrats. The Socialist Party renominated its perennial standard-bearer, Eugene V. Debs.
The general election was bitterly contested by Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs. Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" platform called for social insurance programs, reduction to an eight-hour workday, and robust federal regulation of the economy. Wilson's "New Freedom" platform called for tariff reduction, banking reform, and new antitrust regulation. Incumbent Taft conducted a subdued campaign based on his platform of "progressive conservatism". Debs, who was attempting to gain widespread support for his socialist policies, claimed that Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft were all financed by different factions within the capitalist trusts, and that Roosevelt in particular was a demagogue using socialistic language in order to divert socialist policies up safe channels for the capitalist establishment.
The Republican split enabled Wilson to win 40 states and a landslide victory in the electoral college with just 41.8% of the popular vote, the lowest vote share for a victorious presidential candidate since 1860. Wilson was the first Democrat to win a presidential election since 1892 as well as the first presidential candidate to receive over 400 electoral votes in a presidential election – he is also the only candidate in any presidential election to receive 400 or more electoral votes without attaining an absolute majority of the popular vote. Roosevelt finished second with 88 electoral votes and 27.4% of the popular vote. Taft took 23.2% of the national vote and carried two states, Vermont and Utah; he won the lowest share of the popular vote of any Republican nominee in history. Debs, the fourth-place finisher, won no electoral votes but received 6% of the popular vote, which remains the highest percentage of the vote ever won by a Socialist candidate in the history of American presidential elections. In this election, more than one third of voters cast third-party votes, the greatest percentage of votes to have ever been cast for third-party candidates in an American presidential election. This was the last U.S. presidential election to date in which the second-placed candidate was neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
Background
Republican president Theodore Roosevelt had declined to run for re-election in 1908 in fulfillment of a pledge to the American people not to seek a third term. Roosevelt had tapped Secretary of War William Howard Taft to become his successor, and Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan in the 1908 general election.
Republican Party split
During Taft's administration, a rift developed between Roosevelt and Taft, and they became the leaders of the Republican Party's two wings: progressives led by Roosevelt and conservatives led by Taft. Progressives favored labor restrictions protecting women and children, promoted ecological conservation, and were more sympathetic toward labor unions. They also favored the popular election of federal and state judges over appointment by the president or governors. Conservatives supported high tariffs to encourage domestic production, but favored business leaders over labor unions and were generally opposed to the popular election of judges.
Taft's policies
Cracks in the party began to show when Taft supported the Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act in 1909. The Act favored the industrial Northeast and angered the Northwest and South, where demand was strong for tariff reductions. Early in his term, President Taft had promised to stand for a lower tariff bill, but protectionism had been a major policy of the Republican Party since its founding.
Taft also fought against Roosevelt's antitrust policy. Roosevelt distinguished "good trusts" from "bad trusts", for which he had been lambasted. Taft argued that all monopolies must be broken up. Taft also fired popular conservationist Gifford Pinchot as head of the Bureau of Forestry in 1910. By 1910, the split within the party was deep, and Roosevelt and Taft turned against one another despite their personal friendship. In that summer Roosevelt began a national speaking tour, during which he outlined his progressive philosophy and the New Nationalist platform, which he introduced in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31.
Court power and judicial recall
Another source of tension involved the authority of the nation's courts, especially the Supreme Court. As early as 1910, Roosevelt had begun criticizing certain court decisions, such as Lochner v. New York (1905), and those jurists whom he dubbed "fossilized judges." He believed that the Supreme Court was interpreting the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and the doctrine of "freedom of contract" to forestall necessary reform legislation, such as the limiting of work hours. He, as well as more populist progressives like William Jennings Bryan in the Democratic Party, came out in favor of an amendment to allow the recall of judges and, possibly, judicial decisions. This outraged Taft (a former judge and future Supreme Court Chief Justice) and other constitutional conservatives, like Elihu Root and Alton B. Parker. Taft considered Roosevelt a danger to constitutional government and resolved to resist his eventual challenge for the Republican nomination.
Roosevelt emboldened
In the 1910 midterm elections, the Republicans lost 57 seats in the House of Representatives as the Democrats gained a majority for the first time since 1894. These results were a large defeat for the conservative wing of the party. James E. Campbell writes that one cause may have been a large number of progressive voters choosing third-party candidates over conservative Republicans. Roosevelt continued to reject calls to run for president into 1911. In a January letter to newspaper editor William Allen White, he wrote, "I do not think there is one chance in a thousand that it will ever be wise to have me nominated."
However, speculation continued, further harming Roosevelt and Taft's relationship. After months of continually increasing support, Roosevelt changed his position, writing to journalist Henry Beach Needham in January 1912 that if the nomination "comes to me as a genuine public movement of course I will accept."
Nominations
Republican Party nomination
Delegate selection
For the first time, many convention delegates were elected in presidential preference primaries. Progressive Republicans advocated primary elections as a way of breaking the control of political parties by bosses. Altogether, 12 states held Republican primaries.
Prior to Roosevelt's entry into the contest, Senator Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette was seen as the most likely challenger to Taft, but his campaign fell apart early on, firstly due to his giving a poorly-received speech to the Periodical Publishers Banquet on February 2, and then due to his being forced to take a two week break from campaigning due to ill-health. La Follette still won two of the first four primaries (North Dakota and his home state of Wisconsin), but Roosevelt's entry into the contest doomed what little chance he still had. Meanwhile, Taft won a major victory in Roosevelt's home state of New York and continued to rack up delegates in more conservative, traditional state conventions.
Beginning with a runaway victory in Illinois on April 9, Roosevelt won 9 of the last 10 presidential primaries (including Taft's home state of Ohio), losing only Massachusetts.
Taft also had support from the bulk of the Southern Republican organizations. Delegates from the former Confederate states supported Taft by a 5 to 1 margin. These states had voted solidly Democratic in every presidential election since 1880, and Roosevelt objected that they were given one-quarter of the delegates when they would contribute nothing to a Republican victory.
Convention
For the Republican National Convention, held June 18–22 in Chicago, 388 delegates were selected through the primaries and Roosevelt won 281 delegates, Taft received 71 delegates, and La Follette received 36 delegates. However, Taft had a 566–466 margin, placing him over the 540 needed for nomination, with the delegations selected at state conventions. Roosevelt accused the Taft faction of having over 200 fraudulently selected delegates. However, the Republican National Committee ruled in favor of Taft for 233 of the delegate cases while 6 were in favor of Roosevelt. The committee reinvestigated the 92 of the contested delegates and ruled in favor of Taft for all of them.
Roosevelt supporters criticized the large amount of delegates coming from areas the Republicans would not win, with over 200 delegates coming from areas that had not been won by a Republican since the Compromise of 1877, or the four delegates that came from the territories which didn't vote in the general election. However, Roosevelt had rejected an attempt to abolish delegations from the south at the 1908 Republican National Convention due to him needing them for Taft's nomination.
Herbert S. Hadley served as Roosevelt's floor manager at the convention. Hadley made a motion for 74 of Taft's delegates to be replaced by 72 delegates after the reading of the convention call, but his motion was ruled out of order. Elihu Root, a supporter of Taft, was selected to chair the convention after winning 558 votes against McGovern's 501 votes. Root was accused of having won through the rotten boroughs of the southern delegations as every northern state, except for four, voted for McGovern. In his closing speech, Root reiterated the party's support of "constitutional checks and limitations" by quoting figures like Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln, effectively rebuking Roosevelt's support of the judicial recall and identifying the GOP with constitutional conservatism.
Roosevelt broke with tradition and attended the convention, where he was welcomed with great support from voters. Despite Roosevelt's presence in Chicago and his attempts to disqualify Taft supporters, the incumbent ticket of Taft and James S. Sherman was renominated on the first ballot. Sherman was the first sitting vice president re-nominated since John C. Calhoun in 1828. After losing the vote, Roosevelt announced the formation of a new party dedicated "to the service of all the people." This would later come to be known as the Progressive Party. Roosevelt announced that his party would hold its convention in Chicago and that he would accept their nomination if offered. Meanwhile, Taft decided not to campaign before the election beyond his acceptance speech on August 1. Warren G. Harding presented Taft's name for the nomination. Taft won the nomination while 344 of Roosevelt's delegates abstained from the vote. Henry Justin Allen read a speech from Roosevelt in which he criticized the process and stated that delegates had been stolen from his in order to secure Taft's nomination.
Democratic Party nomination
Other major candidates
In early 1912, it was widely believed that three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would make a fourth attempt to earn the party's nomination, and would likely not have difficulty in winning it. However, Bryan announced several months before the convention that he was not interested in another run for the White House. Though still seen by many as the Democrats' ideological leader, power shifts within the party in the wake of their success at the 1910 mid-term elections meant that Bryan could no longer be guaranteed the two-thirds majority needed to earn the nomination.
Bryan privately conceded that his three presidential runs having all ended in decisive losses, firstly to William McKinley, and then to Taft, would seriously handicap his credibility as a candidate, even if the 1904 election, the only one of the previous four in which Bryan was not the Democratic candidate, had resulted in an even more lop-sided defeat for the party. However, Bryan still had enough followers in the party that he was in a strong position to be the kingmaker at the convention.
The Democratic National Convention was held in Baltimore from June 25 to July 2. Initially, the front-runner was Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri. Though Clark received the most votes on early ballots, he was unable to get the two-thirds majority required to win. Tammany Hall, the powerful New York City Democratic political machine, anticipated that Clark did not have enough support to wrap up a swift victory, and planted the state's delegates with Ohio governor Judson Harmon, switching its support to Clark on the tenth ballot and giving him a simple majority of the vote. Had Clark been able to make a deal for the delegates of House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood, together with any of the favorite sons still in the contest at that point, he would have won the nomination.
Unbeknownst to either Clark's campaign or Tammany Hall, however, Underwood had in fact already struck a behind-the-scenes deal with Woodrow Wilson, the reformist Governor of New Jersey. Wilson and Underwood were both from the party's progressive wing, and neither wanted Clark, who they both considered to be too pro-business, to take the nomination; the two agreed that if one of them got into a position to win the nomination, the other would withdraw in their favor. More significantly, the Tammany endorsement caused Bryan to turn against Clark, whom he decried as the candidate of Wall Street, and he shifted his support to Wilson, who had consistently finished second in balloting until that point.