1916 U.S. presidential election

On November 7, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson won re-election over Republican Charles Evans Hughes, a Supreme Court justice and former governor of New York. The result was one of the closest of the century: Wilson took 277 electoral votes to Hughes's 254, and 49.2 percent of the popular vote to 46.1 percent. The outcome was not clear for days, until California, which Wilson carried by fewer than 4,000 votes, settled it.¹²

World War I dominated the campaign. German submarines had sunk the liner Lusitania in 1915, and many Americans feared being drawn into the fighting. Democrats campaigned on the slogan 'He kept us out of war,' while Wilson also pointed to reforms such as the eight-hour day for railroad workers and a ban on child labor goods in interstate trade. The Republicans had reunited after their 1912 split, but Hughes ran a cautious campaign. One month after his second inauguration, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany after it resumed unrestricted submarine warfare.²