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All 29 Illinois votes to the Electoral College | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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County Results
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Elections in Illinois |
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The 1920 United States presidential election in Illinois took place on November 2, 1920, as part of the 1920 United States presidential election. State voters chose 29 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
A strongly Democratic state during the Second Party System, Illinois became Republican-leaning after the American Civil War due to a combination of strong Free Soil Party heritage amongst its Yankee northern counties with the wartime conversion of some Virginian-settled rock-ribbed Democratic Southern Illinois counties[1] to Unionist Republicanism[2] à la Appalachia.[3] Between the Civil War and World War I, partisanship in Illinois – like in the Border States – largely re-fought the war, with the result that although the Democratic Party gained at least 43 percent of the statewide vote via Southern and German Catholic support in every election up to 1900, they never gained an absolute majority and carried the state's electoral votes only in 1892.[4]
Due to the Democratic Party's growing Populist and prohibitionist leanings, a decline in Democratic support after 1900 in its German Central Illinois strongholds transformed Illinois into a powerfully Republican state at all levels.[5] Even Woodrow Wilson in 1912 when the GOP was mortally divided carried the state by only a very narrow margin. Harding's managers were always confident he would carry Illinois as all but three GOP nominees had since that party was formed.[6] However, actual polls in Illinois vacillated, with a straw ballot in The Farm Journal even placing Cox at 45 percent in this strong Republican state.[7] As election day neared, estimates of a Republican plurality of “at least 264,000” were made via a national survey of newspaper editors.[8]
As it turned out, the editorial estimate was shown extremely conservative by the very earliest reports on polling day, which showed Harding winning by three-to-one.[9] Ultimately, Harding did not finish with so large a margin as this, but nonetheless he carried Illinois by 42.30 percentage points. This constitutes the biggest margin by which Illinois has been carried in the state's presidential election history, the best performance by any Republican candidate,[4] and the third-best vote percentage overall behind Andrew Jackson’s two efforts in 1828 and 1832. Harding carried all but three counties, and was the first-ever Republican victor in the following counties: Calhoun, Cass, Clinton, Effingham, Gallatin, Hamilton, Jasper, Jersey, Mason, Pike, Schuyler, Wabash and White.[10]