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| Elections in Utah |
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The 1904 United States presidential election in Utah was held on November 8, 1904, throughout all forty-five contemporary states as part of the 1904 United States presidential election. State voters chose three representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
In its first presidential election during its statehood year, Utah – with its large reserves of silver – had voted five-to-one for Democrat/Populist William Jennings Bryan, who ran on a platform of monetizing silver. However, with a revived economy, Utah moved much closer to the national mainstream in the ensuring 1900 election, as pre-statehood Republican Party hostility to the dominant LDS church gradually disappeared after the outlawing of polygyny in 1890.[1]
In between Utah’s second and third presidential elections, newly elected but unseated senator and Mormon apostle Reed Smoot went much further towards reversing the nineteenth-century hostility of the Republican Party to the Latter Day Saints. At a time when most traditional Protestant congressmen were opposed to Smoot being seated because religious influence was feared,[2] Mormon prophet and LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith said explicitly that members of the LDS Church should in political matters obey their consciences. Smoot – although a Republican – had been targeted by both major parties in the two years between his election by the Utah Legislature in 1902 and the 1904 presidential campaign, but he corresponded consistently with incumbent president Roosevelt.[3]
Smoot’s work was one factor allowing Roosevelt to sweep twenty-six of Utah’s twenty-seven contemporary counties and carry the state by 28.55 percentage points, which even in the largest landslide since the beginning of widespread popular voting for presidential electors made Utah 9.73 percentage points more Republican than the nation at-large. Another was that Parker himself was hostile to Mormon polygamy,[4] still another was the popularity in the West of Roosevelt’s conservation and trust-busting policies.[5]
Roosevelt’s percentage of the popular vote and margin would be bettered by no Republican in Utah until Dwight D. Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956.[6]
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
- ^ Balmer, Randall and Riess, Janet (editors); Mormonism and American Politics (Religion, Culture, and Public Life), pp. 135-137 ISBN 0231540892
- ^ Perry, Luke and Cronin, Christopher; Mormons in American Politics: From Persecution to Power, p. 52 ISBN 1440804087
- ^ Perry and Cronin; Mormons in American Politics, p. 54
- ^ Murdock, Dr. Everett E.; From Washington and Adams to Hillary and Trump: The Stories behind the Story of Every U.S. Presidential Election, p. 120 ISBN 0923178317
- ^ Menendez, Albert J.; The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868-2004, p. 36 ISBN 0786422173
- ^ Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas; Presidential General Election Results Comparison – Utah
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