A presidential election was held in Indiana on November 3, 1908, as part of the 1908 United States presidential election. The Republican ticket of the U.S. secretary of war William Howard Taft and the U.S. representative from New York's 27th congressional district James S. Sherman defeated the Democratic ticket of the former U.S. representative from Nebraska's 1st congressional district William Jennings Bryan and the former U.S. senator from Indiana John W. Kern. Taft defeated Bryan in the national election with 321 electoral votes.
Background
Partisan coalitions in Indiana at the turn of the century reflected the regional, ethnic, and religious roots of the settler population, with the descendants of White Southerners, German Americans, and Irish Americans (especially Catholics) voting reliably Democratic, while Yankees, Nordic and Scandinavian Americans, and British Americans favored the Republican Party. Southern Indiana leaned Democratic and Northern Indiana leaned Republican, in line with the loose correlation between ethnicity and geography. The state's notable concentration of German Catholics contributed to its closeness in presidential elections during the Third Party System relative to other Lower North states. Bryan's previous campaigns in 1896 and 1900 had seen the state move more securely into the Republican column, as German Catholics alienated by Bryan's outspoken Evangelicalism, conservatives unnerved by the candidate's agrarian radicalism, and urban workers frightened by threats of mass layoffs in the event of a Bryan victory voted Republican for the first time.
General election
Results
Indiana chose 15 electors on a statewide general ticket. State law required voters to elect each member of the Electoral College individually, rather than as a group. This sometimes resulted in small differences in the number of votes cast for electors pledged to the same presidential candidate, if some voters did not vote for all the electors nominated by a party. The following table quotes the official returns published by the secretary of state of Indiana, which list the votes for the first elector on each ticket.