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| Turnout | 53.3%[1] 9.5pp | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 County results Municipality results
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The1920 United States presidential election in Massachusetts took place on November 2, 1920, as part of the1920 United States presidential election, which was held throughout all contemporary 48 states. Voters chose 18 representatives, or electors to theElectoral College, who voted forpresident andvice president.
Massachusetts was won in a landslide byRepublicanSenatorWarren G. Harding ofOhio, who was running againstDemocraticGovernorJames M. Cox ofOhio. Harding's running mate wasGovernorCalvin Coolidge ofMassachusetts, while Cox ran withAssistant Secretary of the NavyFranklin D. Roosevelt ofNew York. Also running that year wasSocialist candidateEugene V. Debs ofIndiana and his running mateSeymour Stedman ofIllinois.
Harding carried Massachusetts overwhelmingly with 68.55% of the vote to Cox's 27.84%, a Republican victory margin of 40.71%. Debs finished third, with 3.25%.
Massachusetts had long been a typical Yankee Republican bastion in the wake of theCivil War, having voted Republican in every election since1856, except in1912, when former Republican PresidentTheodore Roosevelt had run as aProgressive candidate against incumbent Republican PresidentWilliam Howard Taft, splitting the Republican vote and allowing DemocratWoodrow Wilson to win Massachusetts with a plurality of only 35.53% of the vote. In1916, the state had returned to the Republican column, although only by a fairly narrow 4-point margin.
With the deeply unpopular Democratic administration ofWoodrow Wilson as the backdrop for the 1920 campaign, Warren G. Harding promised a "return to normalcy" that appealed to many voters, while Cox was tied to the policies of the Wilson administration, whose unpopularity was especially severe amongIrish-Americans who saw Wilson as pro-Britain and against their independence.[2] Harding won nationally in one of the most decisive landslides in American history, and Massachusetts, already a fiercely Republican state, went even harder for Harding than the nation, voting a solid 15% more Republican than the national average.
Harding was also helped in the state by his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, a traditional Yankee Republican born in neighboringVermont and being the popular sittingGovernor of Massachusetts.
Harding swept every county in the state of Massachusetts, including evenSuffolk County, home to the state's capital and largest city,Boston. Boston had been a Democratic-leaning city prior to this, and while Calvin Coolidge would win the city once more for the GOP in1924, Boston would defect to the Democrats for CatholicAl Smith in1928 and become reliably Democratic in every election that followed. As Coolidge won Suffolk County with a plurality in 1924, 1920 thus remains the last election in which a Republican has won an absolute majority of the vote in Suffolk County.
In 13 of the state's 14 counties (all but Suffolk), Harding broke 60% of the vote, and in nine, Harding broke seventy percent. He even reached eighty percent in the island county of Dukes and peninsular Barnstable.
| 1920 United States presidential election in Massachusetts[3] | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Candidate | Votes | Percentage | Electoral votes | |
| Republican | Warren G. Harding | 681,153 | 68.55% | 18 | |
| Democratic | James M. Cox | 276,691 | 27.84% | 0 | |
| Socialist | Eugene V. Debs | 32,267 | 3.25% | 0 | |
| Socialist Labor | William Wesley Cox | 3,583 | 0.36% | 0 | |
| Write-ins | Write-ins | 24 | 0.00% | 0 | |
| Totals | 993,718 | 100.00% | 18 | ||
| County | Warren G. Harding Republican | James M. Cox Democratic | Eugene V. Debs[4] Socialist | Various candidates[4] Other parties | Margin | Total votes cast[5] | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # | % | # | % | # | % | # | % | # | % | ||
| Barnstable | 6,383 | 84.41% | 1,125 | 14.88% | 29 | 0.38% | 25 | 0.33% | 5,258 | 69.53% | 7,562 |
| Berkshire | 20,138 | 63.11% | 10,956 | 34.33% | 703 | 2.20% | 113 | 0.35% | 9,182 | 28.77% | 31,910 |
| Bristol | 56,734 | 73.65% | 17,719 | 23.00% | 2,179 | 2.83% | 400 | 0.52% | 39,015 | 50.65% | 77,032 |
| Dukes | 1,013 | 86.73% | 150 | 12.84% | 3 | 0.26% | 2 | 0.17% | 863 | 73.89% | 1,168 |
| Essex | 95,057 | 71.87% | 30,560 | 23.11% | 6,076 | 4.59% | 571 | 0.43% | 64,497 | 48.76% | 132,264 |
| Franklin | 9,931 | 77.85% | 2,542 | 19.93% | 242 | 1.90% | 42 | 0.33% | 7,389 | 57.92% | 12,757 |
| Hampden | 46,741 | 68.92% | 19,156 | 28.25% | 1,719 | 2.53% | 204 | 0.30% | 27,585 | 40.67% | 67,820 |
| Hampshire | 13,174 | 70.10% | 5,305 | 28.23% | 286 | 1.52% | 28 | 0.15% | 7,869 | 41.87% | 18,793 |
| Middlesex | 156,636 | 69.90% | 61,661 | 27.52% | 5,135 | 2.29% | 646 | 0.29% | 94,975 | 42.38% | 224,078 |
| Nantucket | 608 | 74.51% | 205 | 25.12% | 3 | 0.37% | 0 | 0.00% | 403 | 49.39% | 816 |
| Norfolk | 51,826 | 74.69% | 15,720 | 22.66% | 1,690 | 2.44% | 149 | 0.21% | 36,106 | 52.04% | 69,385 |
| Plymouth | 33,582 | 73.54% | 9,373 | 20.53% | 2,561 | 5.61% | 147 | 0.32% | 24,209 | 53.02% | 45,663 |
| Suffolk | 108,089 | 58.08% | 67,552 | 36.30% | 9,542 | 5.13% | 915 | 0.49% | 40,537 | 21.78% | 186,098 |
| Worcester | 81,241 | 68.63% | 34,667 | 29.29% | 2,097 | 1.77% | 367 | 0.31% | 46,574 | 39.35% | 118,372 |
| Totals | 681,153 | 68.55% | 276,691 | 27.84% | 32,265 | 3.25% | 3,609 | 0.36% | 404,462 | 40.70% | 993,718 |
State and district results of the1920 United States presidential election | ||
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