1924 United States presidential election in California
election in California
The 1924 United States presidential election in California took place on November 4, 1924, as part of the 1924 United States presidential election. State voters chose 13 electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Since the "Panic of 1893" and large-scale voter registration, California had become a one-party state dominated by the Republican Party. The Democratic Party was largely moribund as a result of its association with the Populist revolt, the rural formerly slave South, and the polyglot metropolis – which held no appeal in an old-stock Western state with very few Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Rigid registration laws and, before 1914, poll taxes, largely disfranchised what immigrants (who had leaned Democratic during the Third Party System) did when entering the state.
Nonetheless, the appeal of Progressivism and tendency towards nonpartisan politics allowed Woodrow Wilson to nearly carry the state in 1912 and do so in 1916 despite substantial Socialist votes in both elections; however, James M. Cox lost most of this support by 1920 as a result of a powerful reaction in the West against the social upheaval Wilson had caused.
Following the Cox debacle, the Democratic Party disintegrated even further. In that same 1920 election they failed to re-elect U.S. Senator James D. Phelan, and after the 1922 election they claimed only five seats in the 80-member California State Assembly, the lower house of the state Legislature, and just two seats out of 40 in the upper house, the California State Senate. Phelan's efforts to have William Gibbs McAdoo chosen as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1924 were defeated, and further ruined the party's organization and furthered cleavages between the "dry" and "wet" sections of the party.
California's large "Progressive" electorate had been divided by issues such as the League of Nations and Prohibition, and was weakened by the election of economy-minded Friend W. Richardson as Governor in 1922.
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