The 1912 U.S. general election was one of the most complicated contests in American presidential history. Former president Theodore Roosevelt challenged his handpicked successor, incumbent William Howard Taft, and outpolled him smartly, taking 27.4% of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes to Taft’s 23.2% of the popular vote and eight electoral votes. This division of the Republican Party allowed the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, to win with a mere 41.8% of the popular vote but a whopping 435 electoral votes. Another significant factor was the candidacy of Eugene Debs, who represented the Socialist Party. Debs did not win any electoral votes, but he took 6% of the popular vote and won over 15% of the vote in two states. This election marked the high tide of socialism in U.S. presidential politics.
As can be seen on the map posted below, Debs did particularly well in the western and north- central regions of the country. Most mining states, noted for their labor radicalism, gave him a relatively high percentage of their vote, with Nevada in first place. As can be seen on the second map, several counties with large logging industries in the far western and north-central regions also had relatively solid support for Debs. The same is true for a few industrial counties in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, and for a smattering of sparsely populated agricultural counties in the western Great Plains, particularly in western North Dakota
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The South shows an interesting pattern. Debs received vanishingly few votes in the southeast but did much better in the south-central region. After Nevada, his best showing was in Oklahoma, a relatively new state that had been founded on the wreckage of Indian Territory. In many Oklahoma counties, as can be seen on the map below, Debs received roughly a quarter of the vote. These counties are concentrated in southern Oklahoma, a region that had been settled primarily by southerners. (I have also indicated on the map the birthplace of folksinger Woody Guthrie, the most well-known Oklahoma socialist, who was born in 1912.) In subsequent presidential elections, Oklahoma would generally be divided, with its south and east supporting candidates in the Democratic Party and its the north and west tending strongly Republican. This pattern is evident in elections through the 1990s. Southern Oklahoma began to turn red in 2000, and in the 2020 election every county but one in the state cast the majority of its votes for Donald Trump (see the final map in this post). The one exception was Oklahoma County, which includes Oklahoma City. But Trump still won this county, taking it by a narrow plurality.
As can be seen on the final map posted below, many of the formerly Democratic-voting counties of southeastern Oklahoma gave a particularly high percentage of their vote to Trump. As can also be seen, Oklahoma counties with relatively high percentages of indigenous, or American Indian, voters also strongly supported Trump. A breakdown of the vote by racial/ethnic categories in these countries would be very interesting.
