CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Dec. 25, 2007 – 10:13 p.m.
A History of U.S. Presidential Primaries: 1912-64
By Bob Benenson, CQ Politics Editor
When it comes to electing the president, the modern campaign era has its roots 95 years ago when North Dakota held the first presidential primary. CQ Politics looks back and charts for you, election by election, how this process grew over the last century into the long and sprawling campaigns that have become part of the political landscape. This first in a series covers 1912-64.
1912 (March 19): North Dakota’s launch of the first primary was an effort to open up a nominating process that had been dominated by party insiders. The Progressive political movement was a key factor in the rise of primaries and one of its members, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Robert M. La Follette, won the North Dakota primary, with former President Theodore Roosevelt finishing second. Roosevelt went on to win in most of the 12 other states that held primaries in this inaugural year. When William Howard Taft used his control of the party machinery to win the delegate vote at the GOP national convention, Roosevelt broke away and ran as the nominee of his newly formed (and ephemeral) Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. Though Roosevelt made history as the only third-party candidate then or since to run ahead of an incumbent president — Taft finished last — the Republican split enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win his first of two terms as president.
1920 (March 9): New Hampshire established its still-unbroken tradition of holding the nation’s first presidential primary. Leonard Wood, a New Hampshire native who was a brigadier general and Army chief of staff, won the Republican primary — all Democratic primary votes went to “unpledged delegates” — and finished second in the combined vote for the year’s 20 primaries to California Sen. Hiram Johnson. But at the convention, party chieftains tapped Ohio Sen. Warren G. Harding, who competed only in his home state’s April 27 primary. Harding won the 1920 general election but died in office in 1923.
1932: Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York, outpaced his nearest rival by a ratio of more than 2 to 1 in the overall primary vote en route to winning his first of four nominations and elections for president. Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, his popularity unraveled by the onset of the Great Depression, trailed former Maryland Sen. Joseph I. France by 15 percentage points in the overall GOP primary vote; though he prevailed at the convention, his primary problems signaled the end of his presidential tenure. Roosevelt won that November in a landslide 57 percent to 40 percent.
1944: With the nation embroiled in World War II and Roosevelt running for an unprecedented fourth term, only 15 states held primaries this year. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, was not a candidate, yet his name was entered by activists urging him to run for the Republican nomination and he dominated the early primaries in Wisconsin (April 5) and Illinois (April 11). But the convention that year ultimately went for New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who ran well in the 1940 primaries but lost the nomination to Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie. Dewey lost but held Roosevelt to 53 percent, the smallest vote share Roosevelt ever had for president, and established himself as the front-runner for the 1948 GOP nomination.
1948: President Harry S. Truman, who moved up from vice president when Roosevelt died in April 1945, led a fractious Democratic Party that splintered at its convention: A conservative, segregationist Southern faction led by South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond broke away to form the States’ Rights Party, while a faction on the left joined former Vice President Henry Wallace in founding the Progressive Party. But these rifts were little in evidence in the primaries, which were dominated by Truman. Dewey, as in 1944, relied on support from party insiders and did not campaign heavily in most Republican primaries. Truman, enduring the brunt of postwar economic problems, began the campaign as the underdog to Dewey but scored a historic upset.
1952 (March 11): Though New Hampshire had been going first for more than 30 years, it had almost always elected slates of unpledged delegates. The 1952 campaign was the first in which the state played a major role in shaping the parties’ nominating campaigns. On the Democratic side, Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver outran incumbent President Truman by 55 percent to 44 percent; Truman, hobbled by public disapproval of the stalemated Korean War, had hinted he would not run again and announced his retirement shortly after New Hampshire, though he insisted the primary result had not driven his decision. On the Republican side, retired Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of Allied troops in Europe during World War II, established himself as a force by defeating Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft by 50 percent to 39 percent in New Hampshire. Though Taft ended up with more combined primary votes, convention delegates selected Eisenhower. Democratic delegates opted for Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson over Kefauver, who had dominated the total primary vote. Eisenhower easily defeated Stevenson in November, as he did in their 1956 rematch.
1960: Sen. John F. Kennedy, a little less than two months short of his 43rd birthday, established himself as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination by winning the April 5 primary in Wisconsin — the first after the New Hampshire contest March 8, which Kennedy, of neighboring Massachusetts, won easily. Kennedy appeared to be at a regional disadvantage in his one-on-one matchup with Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, making his 13 percentage-point victory margin even more impressive. The contest was captured in the well-regarded documentary film “Primary.” Kennedy went on to another impressive win, and effectively ended Humphrey’s hopes for the nomination by winning easily in West Virginia, overcoming doubts that the state’s overwhelmingly Protestant electorate would go for Kennedy’s bid to become the nation’s first Roman Catholic president. Kennedy faced competitors at the convention — including Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, who would become Kennedy’s vice president and ultimate successor — but clinched the nomination on the first ballot. He went on to win a very narrow general election victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon, the two-term vice president, who faced little primary opposition in his bid to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower.
1964: Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a pioneering leader of the ideological conservative movement within the Republican Party, effectively sealed his nomination for president with a close victory in June 2 primary in California; he won by 52 percent to 48 percent over New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who then was the premier figure in the then-sizable liberal wing of the national GOP. The conservative emergence was premature: Democrats still maintained the dominance they had enjoyed for most of the three decades since the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and succeeded at portraying the militarily hawkish Goldwater as dangerous. Johnson — who became president following the November 1963 assassination of Kennedy — won in a landslide with 61 percent of the vote. The campaign was marked, though, by the emergence of actor Ronald Reagan as a conservative Republican spokesman.
Comments
A minor inaccuracy: in 1920, Harding competed in one other primary besides his native Ohio: the Indiana primary a week or two later, where he finished an ignominious fourth.
Thank you for this series of articles. It would be great if you would go into the specifics as to why certain candidates were preferred by the party insiders and if there were key differences on issues between the primary candidates.
I posted the question pertaining to which state hosted the first presidential primary in our PAC newsletter and, I got numerous answers that it was Oregon because Wikipedia claims "In 1910, Oregon became the first state to establish a presidential preference primary in which the delegates to the National Convention were required to support the winner of the primary at the convention." Can you please verify where you determined that North Dakota held a primary before Oregon?
CQ's historic presidential primary information is incomplete. Here is a list of all presidential primaries for 1912: ND, NY, AL (Dems only), WI, IL, PA, NE, OR, MA, FL (Dems only), GA (Dems only), MD, MS (Dems only), CA, OH, NJ, AZ (Dems only), RI (Dems only), SD, and TX (Dems only). One result of CQ's information for 1912, which comes from a book on presidential primaries written by James W. Davis, is that Underwood's primary victories are left out completely. To answer Courtney's question, Oregon's first presidential primary was held in 1912, the same year as North Dakota. ND voted on 3/19/1912 while Oregon voted on 4/19/1912. Oregon and some other states also held vice presidential primaries at the time. Today, only New Hampshire continues the VP primaries. For more information on presidential primaries, including *sourced* returns (unlike James W. Davis's presidential primary returns), visit www.ourcampaigns.com.
Also in 1920, Davis left out the Minnesota primary on 3/15/1920. Wood won there over Johnson and Lowden. Twenty-one states held Republican primaries in 1920.
Another item: a very limited number of presidential primaries were held before 1912. These earliest primaries were delegate contests. Florida held the first of these primaries. The only pre-1912 presidential primary I am aware of that incorporated a presidential preference was Ohio in 1908 when the delegates were identified as either Taft or Foraker supporters. As it turned out, 3/4 of the delegate candidates in Ohio were pledged to Taft, so the primary was mostly meaningless.
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