1912 U.S. presidential election

On November 5, 1912, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton, won the presidency in one of the most unusual races in American history. Four serious candidates ran. Wilson took 435 electoral votes with only 41.8 percent of the popular vote. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as the Progressive (Bull Moose) nominee, finished second with 27.4 percent and 88 electoral votes. The sitting Republican president, William Howard Taft, came third with 23.2 percent and just 8 electoral votes from Utah and Vermont. Socialist Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent, the party's best showing ever.¹²

The race grew out of the feud between Taft and Roosevelt after 1908. Roosevelt won most of the new Republican primaries, but Taft's allies controlled the party machinery and the convention in Chicago renominated Taft. Roosevelt's supporters walked out and formed the Progressive Party, calling for a New Nationalism of strong federal regulation, social insurance and women's suffrage. Wilson answered with his New Freedom, promising to break up monopolies and lower tariffs rather than build a large regulatory state.²

With the Republican vote split almost in half, Wilson won 40 of the 48 states, and the Democrats added the Senate to the House they already held. Three weeks before the vote, Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee and gave his speech anyway. The election showed how a party split can hand victory to a minority candidate, and it put a Southern-born reformer in power just as the federal government was about to expand sharply.¹³