Photo Finish: The Closest Race You've Never Heard Of
What the 3,773 Votes that Decided the 1916 Election Can Tell Us Today
We are no stranger to close elections in the United States and based on recent history and public polling, 2024 looks like it will be no exception. As numerous pollsters and analysts have observed, this year’s presidential election is incredibly close — almost anomalously so.
Yet close elections — even ones that hinge on a small number of votes spread across a small number of states — are far from uncommon in American history. Consider just a few recent examples. The 2000 election, came down to 537 votes in Florida (or a single vote in the Supreme Court). The 2016 election came down to 80,000 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The 2020 election, which came down to about 81,000 votes across Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Naturally, the popular votes were more lopsided in each of these cases, reflecting the power of the Electoral College.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. In 1976, Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford by winning Ohio and Wisconsin by a collective margin of some 46,361 votes. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won when contested results were sent to a congressionally established Electoral Commission amid a constitutional crisis. In 1824, the election was sent to the House of Representatives when none of the four candidates attained a majority of electoral votes, leading to victory for John Quincy Adams.
One of the closest presidential elections in American political history is almost forgotten today, however. The 1916 election came down to a mere 3,773 votes in California which put incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson over the top with 277 electoral votes to Republican Charles Evans Hughes’ 254.1 And it offers some surprising insights into the nature of political campaigns, the evolution of our two major parties, and how foreign policy can affect elections.
An Eminently Beatable Incumbent in a Chaotic World
As the Progressive Era and the major figures of the day recede even further from memory, it’s important to set the scene.
The 1916 election took place against the backdrop of a world at war, with a neutral United States attempting to stand at a wary arm’s length from the war in Europe despite providing loans and materiel to the combatants — or rather, to the Allies since the Royal Navy had effectively blockaded the Central Powers. Germany sought to break out of this hammerlock through submarine warfare, provoking a series of outrages including the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 which killed 128 Americans and flouted the United States’ support for freedom of the seas. After a diplomatic row, Germany had backed away from pursuing unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral vessels but it seemed like only a matter of time before Washington would face the same situation again. There was no easy solution to the dilemma of preserving neutrality and seeking accountability.
Closer to home, the situation along the southern border had also deteriorated. The Mexican Revolution had touched off a decade of instability that descended into civil war, coups, and U.S. military interventions. Wilson had occupied Veracruz in 1914 after American sailors were detained by Mexican authorities. In March 1916, Pancho Villa infamously burned the town of Columbus, New Mexico, which led the president to order General John Pershing to launch a “punitive expedition” in pursuit of the revolutionary which flopped when the Mexican central government mobilized its army.
Domestically, Woodrow Wilson had proven to be a wily political operator in the first two years of his first term, essentially dictating the legislative agenda from the White House to a Democratic Congress — a controversial approach among some members and one that did not endear him to Republicans who unsurprisingly argued for the independence of Capitol Hill as a co-equal branch of government. The president’s measures included a dizzying array of progressive reforms that included the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, child labor protections, worker’s compensation for federal employees, expanded credit for farmers, lower tariffs, and the establishment of the federal income tax in 1915.
These major accomplishments are dimmed today more by the passage of time than diminished by loss of significance, but the fact remained that the United States was in a recession in 1914, business confidence was low, and the war had cut into trade revenues before the income tax had come online, leading Wilson to ask for new taxes to make up the difference which Southern Democrats in the House targeted at the largely Republican Midwest and North. More concerning still, prices were rising throughout Wilson’s term, with meat skyrocketing in particular: by 1913, bacon cost 111% more than it had in the 1890s, while round steak cost 86% more. Consumer prices would only rise further due to the war.
The political situation reflected a closely divided public but offered signs of Republican momentum. In 1914 midterms, the Democrats kept both chambers but the GOP had picked up 62 House seats and two governorships. Leading Republicans were in an optimistic mood about their prospects as they looked to 1916 when they could replace Wilson, a man that party leaders had come to disdain as deceitful, thin-skinned, aloof, and imperious but also but also “a very adroit” foe as Senator Theodore Burton (R-OH) put it.2 The president seemed eminently beatable.
And this was as it should have been, since most Republicans believed that they were the natural party of government: the party that had saved the Union, promoted the American values embodied by Lincoln, and maintained a prosperous and rapidly growing commonwealth. The Democrats, whom they believed were sectional, demagogic, economically unsound, and faintly disloyal, had only taken the White House in 1912 due to what they saw as a fluke.3 Wilson became the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Grover Cleveland due to a fissure in the Republican ranks when former president Theodore Roosevelt lost the nomination to his hand-picked successor and the incumbent president William Howard Taft.
TR walked out of the convention and formed the Progressive (Bull-Moose) Party as the vehicle of his New Nationalism agenda and had split the Republican vote, allowing Wilson to win a plurality of the popular vote. It was a shocking and demoralizing turn of events, spurred in large part by TR’s regret at declining to seek a second full term in 1908 and fueled by fits of pique that led him to denounce the Supreme Court for striking down progressive legislation and demand judicial recall — a position anathema to Republicans. The rift had briefly sundered Roosevelt from his political closest friends, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and two men with whom he was once so in synch that they referred to one another by nicknames drawn from Dumas’ The Three Musketeers: former cabinet secretary and New York senator Elihu Root playing the wise Athos, the portly Taft playing the jovial Porthos, and TR, naturally, playing the prime mover D’Artagnan.
The former president had campaigned vigorously, finishing a speech after being shot at a campaign event in Milwaukee, and benefitted from the rise of progressive Republican insurgents in the West and Midwest who flocked to his banner. Yet he had only won 8 states to Wilson’s 40. (Taft only claimed Utah and Vermont.) To recover from a bruised ego, he then unwisely embarked on his famous trip down the River of Doubt in South America with his son Kermit, suffering from tropical fever that left him much diminished upon his return in 1914.
Due to lack of interest when his name was off the ticket, the Progressive Party withered and Roosevelt began to move back towards the Republicans and became the champion of the “preparedness movement” in view of the war in Europe, which he believed the United States was virtually certain to join and often spoke of in terms that came across as bombastic and reckless to many in a nation who hoped to keep out of it. This was a challenge and an opportunity to his friend Lodge who was the GOP’s major national leader and felt that party unity would pave the way to victory in 1916 but worried about how easily it might be upset.
The Hughes Nomination
It was in this context that Republicans sought to find a credible candidate to take down Wilson who could steer clear of party drama. They believed they had found him in Charles Evans Hughes.
The somewhat forgotten Hughes is one of the most quietly remarkable and talented political figures in the first half of the twentieth century. The son of a Northern Baptist minister, Hughes had ascended to the pinnacle of the legal profession and enjoyed a sterling reputation even though he is now “one of the most enigmatic figures in American politics in the Progressive Era,” per historian Lewis Gould.
Hughes’ remarkable résumé includes two terms as New York’s governor (1907-1910) and service as an associate justice on the Supreme Court (1910-1916), followed by a productive stint as U.S. Secretary of State (1921-1925) and a historically notable one as chief justice of the Supreme Court (1930-1941), where he effectively defeated FDR’s court-packing plan and tempered the conservative majority’s rejection of the New Deal by helping to engineering the famous “switch in time that saved nine.”
To Republicans who were hungry to win back the White House, Hughes had several merits. He was widely respected having risen as a moderate reformer in New York who had taken on big corporations, overhauled child labor protections, introduced the first worker’s compensation system in the United States, and established limits on campaign finance. His was a clean, good government administration — to the point where his relationship with TR soured after he worked to thwart the appointment of a Republican to a patronage post.
In the terms of the day, he was conservative in the sense that he believed in the importance of legal restraints on power, impartial administration over catering to the the popular moods of various interest groups, and generally believed in the virtues of an energetic but reformed capitalism. Yet he was also a liberal in that he was “more sensitive to the necessity for change, less resistant to the forces making for change, than many conservatives” as Dexter Perkins writes: an advocate of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage, a critic of segregation and champion of anti-lynching laws, and a supporter of civil liberties.4
He could come across as Olympian — “if Hughes were more of a human being and a bit less like a heathen god, he would be much stronger with the people,” one contemporary observer noted — and cold, with TR christening him “the bearded iceberg.” His oratory was not particularly distinguished. But Hughes’ stature, intellect, and command of details had won him plaudits on the campaign trail — never more so than when he effectively dismantled the rationale for William Jennings Bryan’s presidential run on the stump for Taft during the 1908 election.
But perhaps more importantly, Hughes’ elevation to the Supreme Court meant that he had avoided the divisive drama of the 1912 race. He had not alienated progressives or conservatives, nor had he been in a position where he had to take stands on the news of the day. In that, he was the opposite of someone like Elihu Root who progressives believed to had stolen the nomination from TR and of the former president himself given his tendency to shoot from the hip when talking about the Great War in terms that aligned the United States with Britain and against Germany.
These qualities distinguished Hughes when Republicans gathered for their convention and despite never having campaigned for the job and actively hoping he wouldn’t be chosen as the party’s standard bearer, Hughes accepted the nomination after winning it on the third ballot and promptly resigned from the court.
The Republican theory of victory was relatively simple. The GOP had to hold the Northeast and Midwest, and win at least some of the larger Western states, but generally felt that they began the race with close to 250 Electoral College votes of the needed 266 to win locked down. Hughes would criticize the Democratic administration’s foreign policy, call for greater preparedness, and argue for a high tariff, a longstanding article of faith for Republicans. Hughes could highlight his support for a federal amendment for women’s suffrage, thus winning female votes in states that had already given them the franchise.5 He would not need to criticize Wilson’s character — something that Hughes felt was beneath his dignity, to the point where he would not even say Wilson’s name while campaigning. The facts would simply speak for themselves.
Bodyblows on the Campaign Trail: Theories of Victory
Of course, facts are often mute — particularly when you don’t know what to say.
Republicans were extremely optimistic as the campaign got underway, with leading members fully expecting most Progressive Party voters to come home and the Old Guard to close ranks. And in an era before modern polling, they could largely sustain this view. This was a presidential campaign totally based on “vibes.”
Yet there was a fundamental problem with Hughes’ theory of victory. The very qualities that made him attractive when selecting a candidate (centrism, probity, and remove from ugly politicking) inflated expectations and meant that he was not quite as sharp on the issues of the day as he might have been had he been in electoral office for the preceding six years. It was compounded by the party’s barely suppressed factional struggles, a genuine uncertainty over what message to offer, and a generally lackluster campaign effort managed by William R. Willcox, a long-time New York Republican politico.
The Wilson record was easier to critique in theory than it was in practice. Hughes was caught between a rock and a hard place when it came to the Great War. Prominent Eastern Republicans like TR and Elihu Root campaigned for military preparedness and vocally criticized Germany, but to embrace this stance too forcefully risked alienating Germans and voters in the critical swing states in the Midwest that hoped to avoid entering the European conflict. It was the same with Mexico: Wilson’s record left much to be desired, but the obvious alternative was to either propose a more forceful policy or a less forceful one — neither fish nor fowl. Hughes’ vague arguments about the need to prepare America if it was attacked failed to land, especially when Wilson’s campaign deftly embraced the memorable slogan “He kept us out of war.”6
The Republican economic agenda faced similar problems. The tariff had been a boon for industrial workers in the late nineteenth century as American manufacturing geared up but had become less relevant as it sought access to global markets, a trend that even arch-protectionist William McKinley had recognized as early as 1901. (In fact, his final speech in Buffalo before his assassination was a call for reciprocal trade treaties with foreign nations to support U.S. exports.)
When railway workers threatened a strike unless they received an eight-hour workday in August, Republicans thought that they had finally alighted on a successful issue. Wilson quickly pushed the Adamson Act through Congress, granting the workers their demands — which Republicans saw as a president caving to the demands of a narrow economic interest that was holding the wider economy hostage. Moderate Republicans might agree on the desirability of some reform but found the process galling, while conservatives opposed the outcome. It was an early instance of what would later become a common critique of executive overreach and excessive friendliness to organized labor.
Here too, however, the message had less appeal than one might have expected. As one Republican told TR, “Our people are to prosperous at this time, under an existing high tariff and the war credits, to worry themselves over the effect of an eight-hour railroad law with which anyway they have a certain sort of sympathy. Nor can they be got into an excited state of mind about the coercion of Congress.”
As the incumbent, Wilson faced bigger headwinds than Hughes but ran the shrewder, more energetic, and slipperier campaign. He had a clearer message, using his incumbency to underscore that the Democrats could govern and his long list of progressive reforms, stressing that “in four years come very close to carrying out the platform of the Progressive Party as well as our own.” He offered a clear, full-throated defense of his foreign policy — even if he privately recognized that the risks of entering the war were larger than his glib slogan indicated.
He also carefully managed his own factions (namely, progressive reformers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, populists in the Midwest, and Southern conservatives) whose divisions were over manageable issues like prohibition and women’s suffrage and were all eager to remain in power since Wilson was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Grover Cleveland. His campaign organization was also better run, focused on turning out various Democratic-aligned interest groups via campaign outreach, and using film and public advertising to pump up Wilson and associate the Republicans with war-mongering.
Wilson needed to hold on and hope that the Republicans wouldn’t get enough traction, though this was far from assured. According to the memoirs of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the president was so concerned that the country would face the difficult decision of whether to enter the war during a lame duck period and transition to a Hughes administration that came up with a unique proposal developed by his adviser Colonel Edward M. House. Wilson would name Hughes as secretary of state and then he and his vice president would resign, thus making Hughes acting president until the inauguration in March 1917.
The Home Stretch: Losing on the Margin
The final months of the campaign were ugly.
Republicans, including TR, indirectly floated longstanding rumors that Wilson had cheated on his first wife who had died in 1914 from Bright’s disease. A train of Hughesettes — wealthy suffragettes supporting Hughes, whose support for the Nineteenth Amendment made him an attractive choice to some women — got heckled as they toured the West. Henry Cabot Lodge alleged that Wilson had secretly backed down during the Lusitania crisis, sending a second secret diplomatic note reassuring the Germans that the United States was not changing its policy on the war.
On Hughes’ own westward swing through the critical state of California in August, conservative opponents of the progressive Republican governor Hiram Johnson dictated his agenda — including a meal at anti-union open shop and a supposed snub of Johnson when the two men were staying at the same hotel in Long Beach. Hughes was unaware of Johnson’s presence, but the entire trip was nonetheless a liability.
Perhaps most depressingly, Wilson’s Justice Department circulated warnings to newspapers that 60,000 African Americans “had been transported” from the South to the Midwest to tip the election to the Republicans. Drafting off the very observable fact of the Great Migration, but merging it with erroneous rumors of fraud, alleging that “a number of these negroes have registered in violation of the laws of the States to which they have gone and have expressed the intention of voting in those states,” a stance that top Republicans declared was “a means to deceive the voters” and “another attempt to use the executive branch for partisan purposes.”
Still, despite all of these vicissitudes, it was entirely unclear who would win in the week before Americans went to the polls.
On November 7, Election Day, the results seemed to suggest a Hughes victory with the candidate allegedly going to bed thinking he had won and waking up to read the major New York papers confirming his victory. Yet by the evening of November 8, the situation was in doubt. Ohio, the Great Plains, and most of the the Western states had gone into Wilson’s column, buoyed by a combination of anti-war and pro-labor sentiment. Wilson had notched 254 electoral votes and only needed either California or Minnesota to win. On Thursday, California went into Wilson’s column by a critical 3,773 votes, sealing his victory. (Other states were also on the margin: New Hampshire went for Wilson by only 56 votes.)
Hughes waited for the official count of California ballots before he conceded on November 22, leading Wilson to quip privately that the telegram was “a little moth-eaten when it got here but still quite legible.” He had much reason to be happy: he had increased his popular vote total substantially, even though he lost seats in the House. It was a remarkable turn of events.
What Can We Learn?
The point of the 1916 election today is not that it serves as a perfect mirror to the 2024 race but rather in what the comparison tell us about American politics.
The similarities are clear enough. Campaigns labor under radical uncertainty, whether borne of polling error or the simple inability to measure public sentiments. This was true in 1916 as it is today, even though we have much more precise instruments for measuring public opinion and guiding strategy.
Imperfect candidates suffer from bad luck in environments that punish the slightest mistake. The struggle to pick and stick to a clear compelling message is perennial, particularly when you have to hold together a coalition with mutually exclusive views in critical states. Hughes struggled with this mightily when it came to the Great War, while Wilson was very fortunate that a crisis didn’t erupt before the election.
Structural forces account for a great deal in politics. One can look at Wilson’s win as a validation for his first term, but the race was extremely close despite Hughes’ flawed campaign. A few minor deviations and “the Bearded Iceberg” would be a much more well known figure today.
And finally, sometimes it takes longer than one might expect to simply tally the votes, which can be a rollercoaster for all concerned as their preferred candidates go up and down while rumors and misinformation swirl. For the dignified Hughes, who had left a job that he loved on the court to run for president, losing by such a narrow margin must have been a very bitter pill to swallow — but swallow it he did.
The popular vote diverged to a wider extent, with Wilson winning 49.2% to Hughes’ 46.1%. Perhaps even more remarkably, Wilson’s margin of victory in New Hampshire was a mere 56 votes! For those keeping track at home, this is the third closest in U.S. presidential history — the others being the 1904 election in Maryland (Theodore Roosevelt won by 51 votes) and the 1832 election in the same state (Henry Clay beating the national victor Andrew Jackson by a staggering 4 votes out of some 38,000 cast).
Quoted in Lewis Gould, The First Modern Clash Over Federal Power: Wilson versus Hughes in the Presidential Election of 1916 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2016), 5. Gould’s book is one of the few dedicated to the 1916 election and is the core source of information for this post.
Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R-MA) captured such sentiments, which drafted heavily off of the Civil War, the rapid economic growth of the late nineteenth century, and the general interest in reform, when he supposedly said, “The men who do the work of piety and charity in our churches, the men who administer our school system, the men who own and till their own farms, the men who perform skilled labor in the shops, the soldiers, the men who went to war and stayed all through, the men who paid the debt and kept the currency sound and saved the nation’s honor, the men who saved the country in war and have made it worth living in peace, commonly and as a rule, by the natural law of their being find their places in the Republican party. While the old slave-owner and slave-driver, the saloon keeper, the ballot box stuffer, the Ku Klux Klan, the criminal class of the great cities, the men who cannot read or write, commonly and as a rule, by the natural law of their being, find their congenial place in the Democratic party.”
Dexter Perkins, Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), xxi. As Perkins writes elsewhere, “Hughes was a happy mixture of the liberal and the conservative. He was wise enough to know that you cannot preserve a social order unless you eradicate its abuses, and so he was never a stand-patter. On the other side he could see that change carried perils as well as promises. Sometimes he stood out against these perils. He was not always wise, it is true. We do not have to agree with him in everything. But he stands a noble and constructive figure in American life.”
In 1916, women could vote for president in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and Washington State.
Wilson also used the slogan “America First” — as did Warren Harding in 1920, suggesting how mutable it was in these years.