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All 11 Tennessee votes to the Electoral College | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 County Results
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| Elections in Tennessee |
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The 1932 United States presidential election in Tennessee took place on November 8, 1932, as part of the 1932 United States presidential election. Tennessee voters chose 11 [2] representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
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For over a century after the Civil War, Tennessee was divided according to political loyalties established in that war. Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the five West Tennessee Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne [3] voted Republican – generally by landslide margins – as they saw the Democratic Party as the "war party" who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight. [4] Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state's secession was equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction. [5] After the disfranchisement of the state's African-American population by a poll tax was largely complete in the 1890s, [6] the Democratic Party was certain of winning statewide elections if united, [7] although unlike the Deep South Republicans would almost always gain thirty to forty percent of the statewide vote from mountain and Highland Rim support.
The 1920 elections saw a significant but not radical change, whereby by moving into a small number of traditionally Democratic areas in Middle Tennessee [8] and expanding turnout due to the Nineteenth Amendment and powerful isolationist sentiment, [9] the Republican Party was able to capture Tennessee's presidential electoral votes and win the governorship and take three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP First and Second Districts. In 1922 and 1924, with the ebbing of isolationist sympathy and a consequent decline in turnout, [10] the Democratic Party regained Tennessee's governorship and presidential electoral votes; however, in 1928 anti-Catholicism against Democratic nominee Al Smith in this powerfully fundamentalist state [11] meant that Herbert Hoover improved upon Harding’s performance, although he failed to gain the down-ballot coattails of 1920.
The Great Depression and the absence of anti-Catholic issues meant that it was universally expected Tennessee would return to Democratic ranks in 1932. [12] This was especially true because, despite a dispute over the Democratic gubernatorial primary that saw runner-up Lewis Pope make a third-party run in the general election, both Pope and primary winner Hill McAlister strongly backed Roosevelt. [12]
On polling day, the campaign managers for Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (D–New York), running with Speaker John Nance Garner were confident that the Democratic Party would carry the state by at least one hundred thousand votes. [13] Although the campaign managers for incumbent President Hoover were confident he could retain the state, ultimately Roosevelt’s campaigns were conservative in their estimation: Tennessee would won by the Democrat with 66.49 percent of the popular vote, and Hoover would decline by over twenty percent to only 32.48 percent. [14] Despite this, the crest of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains would be the most resistant region to Roosevelt’s appeal in the entire nation: Hoover’s 84.51 percent of the vote in Johnson County, although less than the Republican percentage in the previous four elections, would be the highest he received in any county nationwide, [15] whilst Sevier County and Carter County would be Hoover’s fifth- and sixth-best nationally.
