1932 United States presidential election in Utah

← 1928 November 8, 1932 1936 →

Nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt Herbert Hoover Party Democratic Republican Home state New York California Running mate John N. Garner Charles Curtis Electoral vote 4 0 Popular vote 116,750 84,795 Percentage 56.52% 41.05%

County Results Roosevelt   40–50%   50–60%   60–70% Hoover   40–50%   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%

President before election Herbert Hoover Republican Elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt Democratic

The1932 United States presidential election in Utah took place on November 8, 1932, as part of the1932 United States presidential election. All contemporary forty-eight states took part, and state voters selected four voters to theElectoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

Utah, like every state west of theAppalachian Mountains, voted forFranklin D. Roosevelt overHerbert Hoover by a substantial margin, giving the first Democratic victory in the state since1916 when anti-war sentiment had shifted the state toWoodrow Wilson.^[1] Utah's swing to the Democrats was 23.19 percentage points, much smaller than the national swing of 35.18 percentage points, as the anti-Catholicism which marred the preceding election was less prevalent among the LDS hierarchy than in the South or the Pacific Northwest. Consequently, for this election Utah voted more Republican than the nation at-large for the first time in twenty years, by a margin of 2.29 points on a two-party basis.^[2] Hoover managed to retain pluralities in seven of Utah's twenty-nine counties, although in San Juan County Hoover won by only a solitary vote and in sparsely populated Daggett County by just eleven. This was nonetheless equal with Missouri^[a] and behind only Kansas^[b] as the most counties in one state west of the Mississippi – in all of which Hoover retained only forty-six counties out of 1,161 – remaining Republican.

Herbert Hoover, who had been elected in a third consecutive Republican landslide in1928, was to become extremely unpopular by the time he was up for re-election in 1932, owing to unemployment rising to a whopping twenty-five percent and Hoover'sSmoot-Hawley Tariff (proposed by long-serving Utah SenatorReed Smoot) had cut severely into exports due to retaliatory tariffs from foreign governments.^[3]

The Mountain States, including Utah, were even more severely hit by the economic downturn than the national average: Utah's lost consumption between the 1929 crash and the election was about one standard deviation above the national mean.^[4] There was also extreme concern over the falling price of silver,^[5] of which Utah was a major producer.^[6]

In a poll conducted by theLiterary Digest, Hoover was far behind Roosevelt in all western states,^[7] whose electoral votes the Republican Party had monopolized during the three preceding elections. Paul Mallon in his "National Whirlgig" two weeks before the election suggested Roosevelt had a "degree of chance" in Utah, but that the Democrats were certain of victory in the nation as a whole.^[8]

• Box Elder
• Beaver
• Cache
• Davis
• Duchesne
• Emery
• Grand
• Morgan
• Salt Lake
• Rich
• Sanpete
• Sevier
• Summit
• Tooele
• Utah
• Uintah
• Washington
• Wasatch
• Wayne
• Weber

• United States presidential elections in Utah

• 1932 Utah elections
• 1932 United States presidential election by state
• United States presidential elections in Utah

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