The 1920 United States presidential election in Michigan took place on November 2, 1920, as part of the 1920 United States presidential election. Voters chose 15 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Since the Panic of 1893 and the Populist movement, Michigan had been a rigidly one-party polity dominated by the Republican Party. In the 1894 elections, the Democratic Party lost all but one seat in the Michigan legislature, and the party would never make major gains there over the four ensuing decades.
The dominance of the culture of the Lower Peninsula by anti-slavery Yankees would be augmented by the turn of formerly Democratic-leaning German Catholics away from that party as a result of the remodelled party's agrarian and free silver sympathies, which became rigidly opposed by both the upper class and workers who followed them. At the same time, the Populist movement eliminated Democratic ties with the business and commerce of Michigan and other Northern states. Unlike the other states of the Upper Midwest, the Yankee influence on the culture of the Lower Peninsula was so strong that left-wing third parties did not provide significant opposition to the Republicans, nor was there more than a moderate degree of coordinated factionalism within the hegemonic Michigan Republican Party.
Although by taking a substantial proportion of the 1912 “Bull Moose” vote, incumbent president Woodrow Wilson had managed the best performance in Michigan by a Democrat since Grover Cleveland in 1888, 1918 saw a major reaction against Wilson throughout the Midwest, due to supposed preferential treatment of Southern farmers: Republicans would hold every seat in the State Senate for over a decade after the fall election, as they had between 1895 and 1897 and between 1905 and 1911.
During the 1920 election campaign, Michigan gained almost no attention because it had been so firmly Republican over the past quarter-century. A poll of four university students showed three voting for Republican candidate Warren G. Harding and one for Democratic opponent James M. Cox. A later poll in October showed that the very small August poll was not inaccurate, with Harding leading by slightly less than three-to-one. The Post-Crescent’s expectations were fulfilled, as Harding won in a landslide, with almost 73 percent of the vote to only 22.27 percent for Cox. Harding swept all of Michigan's 83 counties, receiving more than 60% of the vote in every county except for Manistee County.
Results
Results by county
The results below are those for the highest elector on each ticket. The results listed in the 1921-1922 Michigan Manual are a "general average" for each ticket and thus not the "true" results.
Counties that flipped from Democratic to Republican
- Arenac
- Calhoun
- Cass
- Crawford
- Jackson
- Kalamazoo
- Kent
- Monroe
- Otsego
- St. Joseph
Analysis
With 72.76 percent of the popular vote, Michigan proved to be Harding's third strongest state in the 1920 election terms of popular vote percentage after North Dakota and Vermont.
Harding received the largest share of the popular vote in a presidential election for Michigan at the time, though that record would be broken four years later. Cox fell more than 3.5 percent below the previous worst Democratic showing by Alton B. Parker from 1904. This was the first of three consecutive elections where Michigan supported a Republican candidate with more than seventy percent of the vote and the only example of any presidential candidate receiving such a high share in the state.
Concurrent with Harding's triumph in the state, the Republicans would win every single seat in the State Senate, and the State House of Representatives.
Manistee county
Many sources show Cox carrying Manistee County by five votes. This result can be traced back to the 1921-1922 Michigan Official Directory and Legislative Manual (link included in references). However, during this era, Michigan was still voting for presidential electors directly and the Michigan Manuals reported only average votes per ticket in each county. In 1920, the votes received by Republican presidential electors in Manistee County varied considerably, from a high of 3,936 (for Mary L. Veenflict) to a low of 661 (for Myron J. Sherwood). The following table shows the Republican and Democratic vote in Manistee County in 1920:
Based on these figures, the average vote is 2,180 for Harding and 2,185 for Cox (the 1921-22 Manual lists 2,179 and 2,184, respectively, by rounding down). However, the usual convention for reporting on presidential elections from before the introduction of the modern short ballot is to use the results for the elector on each ticket who received the most votes statewide. Following that convention, the results in Manistee County are 3,274 for Harding and 2,196 for Cox (as shown in the full county by county table above). However, there were ultimately more total Democratic votes than Republican votes recorded in the county, so that gives some support to a potential Cox victory.
Michigan also held simultaneous elections for state officers in 1920. In the gubernatorial election, for instance, the vote in Manistee County was 59.88% Republican and 38.16% Democratic. Similar results were polled in other races. Thus, Cox winning Manistee County in the presidential election would be entirely inconsistent with the rest of the results in Michigan. Indeed, following the highest elector convention results in the split in Manistee County being 57.65% for Harding and 38.67% for Cox, which is consistent with the other statewide elections.