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| Elections in North Carolina |
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The 1920 United States presidential election in North Carolina took place on November 2, 1920, as part of the 1920 United States presidential election, which was held throughout all contemporary forty-eight states. Voters chose twelve representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Like all former Confederate states, North Carolina would during its “Redemption” develop a politics based upon Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement of its African-American population and dominance of the Democratic Party. Unlike the Deep South, the Republican Party possessed sufficient historic Unionist white support from the mountains and northwestern Piedmont to gain a stable one-third of the statewide vote total in general elections even after blacks lost the right to vote.[1] Although with disfranchisement of blacks the state introduced a poll tax, it was less severe than other former Confederate states with the result that a greater proportion of whites participated than anywhere else in the South.[2] A rapid move following disenfranchisement to a completely “lily-white” state GOP also helped maintain Republican support amongst the state’s voters.[3] Like Virginia, Tennessee and Oklahoma, the relative strength of Republican opposition meant that North Carolina did not have statewide White primaries, although certain counties did use the White primary.[4]
Although North Carolina had never given women suffrage rights at any level of government before 1919, nor did its legislature consider the Nineteenth Amendment when it passed the Federal House and Senate, during 1920 the state passed by more a more than three-to-one margin a constitutional amendment that made it the first former Confederate state to abolish its poll tax.[5] This amendment was first proposed as early as 1908,[6] but was only given serious thought by the state legislature after the Sixteenth Amendment took effect in 1913 and it was recognized that North Carolina was burdened with an inefficient and regressive tax system.[7] The abolition of the poll tax and women's suffrage, as it turned out, would cause in North Carolina amongst the largest mobilizations of new voters in the Union.[8]
Although Republican nominee Warren G. Harding had urged the state's mountain Republican legislators to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment,[9] neither Harding nor Democratic nominee and Ohio Governor James M. Cox did any campaigning in a state which had voted Democratic at every election since 1876. However, at the end of October the GOP, sensing a landslide, believed based on an early Rexall straw poll that it had a chance of carrying North Carolina as well as Tennessee[a] for its first victory in a former Confederate state since 1876.[10] Later returns, however, gave Cox a larger win than Woodrow Wilson had gained in 1916.[11] As it turned out, Cox would carry the state comfortably, and North Carolina would prove the state that most resisted the anti-Wilson trend, with Cox losing fewer than 3 percentage points on Wilson and Polk County even switching from voting for Republican Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 to voting for Cox.[12]
- ^ Phillips, Kevin P.; The Emerging Republican Majority, pp. 210, 242 ISBN 978-0-691-16324-6
- ^ Rusk. J.J, and Stucker J.J.; ‘The Effect of Southern Election Laws on Turnout Rates’ in Silbey, Joel H. and Bogue, Allan G., The History of American Electoral Behavior, p. 246 ISBN 0691606625
- ^ Heersink, Boris; Jenkins, Jeffery A. Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968. pp. 48–50, 239–243. ISBN 9781316663950.
- ^ Klarman, Michael J. (2001). "The White Primary Rulings: A Case Study in the Consequences of Supreme Court Decision-Making". Florida State University Law Review. 29: 55–107.
- ^ ‘Vote for Constitutional Amendments by Counties’, in North Carolina Manual (1920), pp. 324-328
- ^ ‘Poll-Tax Abolition Urged.: North Carolina Board Favors Levy of 2-3 Per Cent on Assessments’; Special to the Washington Post, December 24, 1908, p. 3
- ^ Steelman, Joseph F.; Origins of the Campaign for Constitutional Reform in North Carolina, 1912-1913; The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. 56, no. 4 (October, 1979) pp. 396-418
- ^ Schuyler, Lorraine Gates; The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s, p. 190 ISBN 9780807857762
- ^ ‘Harding resents Suffrage Attack: Declares He Is Impatient Over Charges That Republicans Oppose Women’; New York Times, July 15, 1920, p. 1
- ^ ‘Victory is Claimed by Rival Chairmen: Hays Sees 368 Electoral Votes for Harding’; The Washington Post, October 31, 1920, p. 1
- ^ ‘Cox Gains in Straw Vote: Late Returns Give Him Missouri – Some Other States Close’; New York Times, October 31, 1920, p. 6
- ^ Menendez, Albert J.; The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868-2004, p. 52 ISBN 0786422173
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