1904 United States presidential election

1904 United States presidential election

The 1904 U.S. presidential election was the 30th quadrennial presidential election. Incumbent Republican President Theodore Roosevelt defeated the Democratic nominee, Alton B. Parker. Two third-party candidates, Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party and Silas C. Swallow of the Prohibition Party, each took over 1% of the popular vote.

About 1904 United States presidential election in brief

Summary 1904 United States presidential electionThe 1904 United States presidential election was the 30th quadrennial presidential election. Incumbent Republican President Theodore Roosevelt defeated the Democratic nominee, Alton B. Parker. Roosevelt’s landslide victory made him the first president to win a term in his own right. Two third-party candidates, Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party and Silas C. Swallow of the Prohibition Party, each took over 1% of the popular vote. Roosevelt became the first presidential candidate in American history to receive at least 300 electoral votes in a victorious campaign. The Republican platform insisted on maintenance of the protective tariff, called for increased foreign trade, pledged to uphold the gold standard, favored expansion of the merchant marine, promoted a strong navy, and praised in detail Roosevelt’s foreign and domestic policy. In 1904, both William Jennings Bryan and former President Grover Cleveland declined to run for president. Since the two Democratic nominees of the past 20 years did not seek the presidential nomination, Parker emerged as the frontrunner. Parker was the Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals and was respected by both Democrats and Republicans in his state. The 1904 Democratic National Convention nominated Parker on the second ballot of the convention, defeating newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Parker refused to work actively for the nomination, but did nothing to restrain his conservative supporters, among them the sachems of Tammany Hall. The struggle inside the Democratic Party over the nomination was one of the most exciting and sensational in the history of the party.

He denounced Judge Parker as a self-hating Gold-Stick Democrat and declared that he was no longer interested in being a Gold-stick Democrat. He declared that before he was nominated he had no enemies nor errors to make him unavailable to make the party unavailable to him. The Republicans paid Parker the honor of running no one against him when he ran for various political positions. He would have preferred Representative Robert R. Hitt from Illinois, but he did not consider the vice-presidential nomination worth a fight. With solid support from New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, Senator Charles W. Fairbanks was easily placed on the 1904 Republican ticket in order to appease the Old Guard. Since conservatives in the Republican Party denounced Theodore Roosevelt as a radical, they were allowed to choose the Vice-Presidential candidate. Roosevelt was nominated unanimously on the first ballot with 994 votes. He was the first American president to be elected to a second term in office after the death of his predecessor, William McKinley, in September 1901. The election was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1904, and Roosevelt won by a margin of 18.8% to 18.9%. Roosevelt’s margin of victory was the largest since James Monroe’s victory in the 1820 presidential election, and the first time a Republican had won the presidency by more than 10% in a single election. The Democratic Party nominated Parker as its presidential candidate. The conservative Bourbon Democrat allies of former PresidentGrover Cleveland temporarily regained control of the Democratic party from the followers ofWilliam Jennings Bryan.