The 1928 United States presidential election in Utah took place on November 6, 1928 as part of the 1928 United States presidential election. All contemporary forty-eight states took part, and state voters selected four voters to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Utah voted for Republican nominee Herbert Hoover, formerly Secretary of Commerce, over the Democratic nominee, four-time New York governorAl Smith. Mormon Utah was much less affected by anti-Catholic passion against Smith and his faith than either the Protestant Upper South or the secular Pacific Northwest: indeed the LDS hierarchy endorsed Smith when he won the Democratic nomination.[1] In fact, in the days before the election it was thought by pollsters that Smith would carry the state,[2] although neither Cox nor Davis nor La Follette had won a single county during the previoustwo elections. However, late swings gave the state to Hoover by a margin whose size increased in late counting.[2]
Nonetheless, the LDS endorsement did cause Utah to prove Smith's eleventh-strongest state – and his strongest outside the urban Northeast or the "Solid South" – voting 9.70 percent more Democratic than the nation at-large.[3] Smith divided the sizable 1924 La Follette vote with Hoover, and carried the ethnically diverse mining-based Carbon County by fourteen, and also won a five-point majority in Juab County in the state's west for the first Republican losses in any Utah county since 1916 when anti-war sentiment shifted the state to Woodrow Wilson.[4]
^Archer, J. Clark and Taylor, Peter J.; Section and Party: A Political Geography of American Presidential Elections, from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan p. 173 ISBN0471100145
^ abClapper, Raymond; 'Hoover Deluge Sweep Higher: May Pass Mark Set by Harding; Smith Gets Greatest Popular Vote Ever Given Democrat but Makes Poor Showing on Electoral'; The Pittsburgh Press, November 7, 1928, p. 1
