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| Elections in Oklahoma |
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The 1928 United States presidential election in Oklahoma took place on November 6, 1928, as part of the 1928 United States presidential election which was held throughout all contemporary 48 states. Voters chose ten representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president. In its early years, Oklahoma was a “Solid South” state whose founding fathers like "Alfalfa Bill" Murray and Charles N. Haskell had disfranchised most of its black population via literacy tests and grandfather clauses, [1] the latter of which would be declared unconstitutional in Guinn v. United States . [2] In 1920 this “Solid South” state, nonetheless, joined the Republican landslide of Warren G. Harding, electing a GOP senator and five congressmen, [3] but in 1922 the Democratic Party returned to their typical ascendancy as the state GOP became bitterly divided. [4]
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In this Ku Klux Klan-dominated state almost entirely part of the Southern Protestant “Bible Belt”, [5] the nomination of anti-Prohibition Catholic New York Governor Al Smith as the Democratic nominee was extremely controversial, with prominent former Senator Robert Latham Owen refusing steadfastly to endorse him, [6] despite nominating dry Southern Democrat Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson of Arkansas.
Early polls showed a massive trend away from Smith, with a September poll saying seventy-six thousand Oklahoma Democrats would vote for Republican nominees, former Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover of California and Senate Majority Leader Charles Curtis of Kansas, [7] and a mid-October poll saying Hoover would receive seventy percent of the vote in the Sooner State. [8] At the end of October, although the number of Oklahoma Democrats believed to be supporting Hoover had not fallen, and a finding that the Republicans had helped enroll one hundred and fifty thousand new voters, Hoover’s margin was reduced to fifty thousand. [9]
As it turned out, the later poll was over-favourable to Smith. Hoover ultimately won the state by a margin of 28.28 percentage points. This was the first election since statehood when Oklahoma had voted more Republican than the nation at large, and the only one until 1960. In some previously Democratic counties in southwestern Oklahoma, Hoover gained vote shares more than thirty percent higher than Calvin Coolidge had in 1924, despite the fact that Smith visited the state in September and gave a major speech on the issue of religious tolerance. [10]
Hoover carried all but eleven of Oklahoma’s 77 counties, with only culturally Southern Choctaw Country in the southeast (an area also known as "Little Dixie") remaining loyal to Smith – and even there Democratic margins were smaller than usual for the era. He was the only Republican until Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide to carry the following counties: Carter, Cotton, Harmon, Jackson, Jefferson, Murray and Tillman. [11] Hoover was also the first Republican presidential candidate to win the following counties: Beckham, Cleveland, Grady, Hughes, McClain and Pontotoc. [11]
