1896 United States presidential election in Georgia

← 1892 November 3, 1896 (1896-11-03) 1900 →

Nominee William Jennings Bryan William McKinley Party Democratic Republican Alliance Populist Home state Nebraska Ohio Running mate Arthur Sewall Garret Hobart Electoral vote 13 0 Popular vote 93,885 59,395 Percentage 57.78% 36.56%

County Results Bryan   40–50%   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%   80–90%   90–100% McKinley   30–40%   40–50%   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%

President before election Grover Cleveland Democratic ElectedPresident William McKinley Republican

The1896 United States presidential election in Georgia took place on November 3, 1896, as part of the wider United States presidential election. Voters chose 13 representatives, or electors, to theElectoral College, who voted forpresident andvice president.

Following Reconstruction,Georgia would be the first former Confederate state to substantially disenfranchise its newly enfranchised freedmen and manypoor whites, doing so in the early 1870s.^[1] This largely limited the Republican Party to a few North Georgia counties with substantialCivil WarUnionist sentiment – chieflyFannin but also to a lesser extentPickens,Gilmer andTowns^[2] – and in presidential elections to a small number of counties elsewhere where blacks were not yet fully disenfranchised. The Democratic Party served as the guardian ofwhite supremacy against a Republican Party historically associated with memories ofReconstruction, and the main competition becameDemocratic primaries, which were restricted to whites on the grounds of the Democratic Party being legally a private club.^[3] This restriction was done by local county laws, but combined with the highly efficacious cumulativepoll tax introduced in 1877 meant that turnout declined steadily throughout the 1880s,^[4] unlike any other former Confederate state except South Carolina.

Georgia was won by theDemocratic andPopulist nominees, formerRepresentativeWilliam Jennings Bryan and his running mateArthur Sewall ofMaine. They defeated theRepublican nominees,former Ohio GovernorWilliam McKinley and his running mateGarret Hobart ofNew Jersey. Bryan won the state by a margin of 21.22%.

However, politics after the first demobilization was always chaotic. Third-party movements, chiefly the Populist Party, gained support amongst the remaining poor white and black voters in opposition to theplanter elite.^[5] Whereas the Republican Party had not contested a statewide election seriously since1876,^[6] The Populists made significant runs for the Georgia governorship in1892,1894, and1896, which would have been stronger but for large scaleBlack Beltelectoral fraud.^[7] In the presidential race the state was hit by a dispute between state Populist leaderThomas E. Watson and Maine shipbuilder Arthur Sewall over the vice-presidential nomination, which led to Watson's frustration and fury increasing and failed to gain either candidate local support.^[8]

The Populist political maneuvering, combined with past alliances of Republicans with the Populist movement, increased Georgia's Republican vote to the highest level seen in any presidential election since1872 at the height of Reconstruction.^[9] Nonetheless, McKinley never campaigned in Georgia, and Bryan still carried the state by over twenty-one points.

Bryan would later win Georgia again against William McKinleyfour years later and would win the state again in1908 againstWilliam Howard Taft.

• United States presidential elections in Georgia

• 1896 United States presidential election by state
• United States presidential elections in Georgia (U.S. state)
• 1896 Georgia (U.S. state) elections

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use American English from June 2025
• All Wikipedia articles written in American English
• Use mdy dates from September 2023
• Elections using electoral votes
• Pages using sidebar with the child parameter