The 1908 United States presidential election in Indiana took place on November 3, 1908. Voters chose 15 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Ever since the Civil War, partisan alliances in Indiana had been related to history of White settlement, with most of Southern Indiana and German-settled counties voting strongly Democratic, opposed to Yankee-settled Northern Indiana which voted Republican.[1] Between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Third Party System, elections in the state were always very close; although the state become more Republican when William Jennings Bryan’s free silver policy drove conservative Democrats to the Republican party for the following two decades and would lead to him to lose to William McKinley in 1896 and 1900.[2] However, until Alton B. Parker lost the state by thirteen points in 1904, Indiana’s strong Southern leanings meant its Democratic counties remained very loyal and the state remained much closer than the other “Lower North” states of Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.[3]
For 1908, third-time Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan nominated, under the advice of future Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, former Indianapolis city solicitor John W. Kern as his running mate in an effort to capture this electorally crucial state that had not voted for a popular vote loser since 1848.[4] However, Republican nominee, Secretary of WarWilliam Howard Taft would nonetheless achieve the fourth consecutive Republican win in the state by the narrow margin of 1.49 percentage points.
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