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| Turnout | 81.38%[1] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 County Results Harding 50–60% 60–70% 70–80%
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The1920 United States presidential election in New Jersey took place on November 2, 1920. All contiguous 48 states were part of the1920 United States presidential election. Voters chose 14 electors to theElectoral College, which selected thepresident andvice president.
New Jersey was won in a landslide by theRepublican nominees,SenatorWarren G. Harding ofOhio and his running mateGovernorCalvin Coolidge ofMassachusetts. Harding and Coolidge defeated theDemocratic nominees,GovernorJames M. Cox ofOhio and his running mateAssistant 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 New Jersey overwhelmingly with 67.65 percent of the vote to Cox's 28.42 percent, a victory margin of 39.23%.[2] This is the highest popular vote percentage ever recorded by any candidate in New Jersey.[3] On the county level map, reflecting the decisiveness of his victory, Harding became the first presidential nominee to sweep all 21 of New Jersey's counties, a feat later accomplished only byDwight D. Eisenhower in1956,Lyndon B. Johnson in1964 andRichard Nixon in1972.[3]
He was the first Republican to ever carryWarren County andHunterdon County and only the second afterWilliam McKinley in1896 to carrySussex County,[4] which had been historically hostile to Yankee New England and Democratic ever since theSecond Party System.[5] Harding broke sixty percent of the vote in seventeen counties and seventy percent in nine of those.
Debs finished in a distant but fairly solid, for athird-party candidate, third with 3.00 percent.
Like much of theNortheast, New Jersey in this era was a staunchly Republican state, having not given a majority of the vote to a Democratic presidential candidate since1892. 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. Harding won nationally in one of the most decisive landslides in American history, and New Jersey, already a fiercely Republican state, went even harder for Harding than the nation, making New Jersey a solid 13 points more Republican than the national average.
As of2020, this remains the strongest ever performance by any presidential candidate in New Jersey; no candidate has ever exceeded Harding's share of the popular vote or his margin of victory. The elections of 1920 and1924 would prove to be the Republican Party's high mark in the state of New Jersey, the culmination of an era of Republican dominance in the state beginning in1896. By1928, the state would begin trending Democratic when the Democratic Party nominatedAl Smith, a New York City native and Roman Catholic ofIrish,Italian andGerman immigrant heritage who appealed greatly to urban New Jersey voters, and beginning in1932, the state would vote Democratic in all four of DemocratFranklin Roosevelt's elections with the rise of theNew Deal Coalition.Hudson County would not vote Republican until1956.
| 1920 United States presidential election in New Jersey | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Candidate | Votes | Percentage | Electoral votes | |
| Republican | Warren G. Harding | 611,541 | 67.65% | 14 | |
| Democratic | James M. Cox | 256,887 | 28.42% | 0 | |
| Socialist | Eugene V. Debs | 27,141 | 3.00% | 0 | |
| National Prohibition | Aaron S. Watkins | 4,734 | 0.52% | 0 | |
| Farmer-Labor | Parley P. Christensen | 2,200 | 0.24% | 0 | |
| Socialist Labor | William Wesley Cox | 923 | 0.10% | 0 | |
| Single Tax | Robert Macauley | 517 | 0.06% | 0 | |
| Totals | 903,943 | 100.0% | 14 | ||
| County | Warren Gamaliel Harding Republican | James Middleton Cox Democratic | Eugene Victor Debs Socialist | Aaron Sherman Watkins National Prohibition | Various candidates Other parties | Margin | Total votes cast[6][a] | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # | % | # | % | # | % | # | % | # | % | # | % | ||
| Atlantic | 21,245 | 76.63% | 5,753 | 20.75% | 390 | 1.41% | 287 | 1.04% | 50 | 0.18% | 15,492 | 55.88% | 27,725 |
| Bergen | 47,512 | 76.26% | 12,396 | 19.90% | 1,849 | 2.97% | 155 | 0.25% | 393 | 0.63% | 35,116 | 56.36% | 62,305 |
| Burlington | 17,898 | 68.73% | 7,532 | 28.92% | 229 | 0.88% | 318 | 1.22% | 64 | 0.25% | 10,366 | 39.81% | 26,041 |
| Camden | 40,771 | 65.67% | 17,893 | 28.82% | 2,467 | 3.97% | 725 | 1.17% | 231 | 0.37% | 22,878 | 36.85% | 62,087 |
| Cape May | 5,785 | 70.76% | 2,198 | 26.89% | 107 | 1.31% | 77 | 0.94% | 8 | 0.10% | 3,587 | 43.88% | 8,175 |
| Cumberland | 11,913 | 68.36% | 4,487 | 25.75% | 473 | 2.71% | 501 | 2.87% | 53 | 0.30% | 7,426 | 42.61% | 17,427 |
| Essex | 116,168 | 70.90% | 40,970 | 25.00% | 5,939 | 3.62% | 176 | 0.11% | 595 | 0.36% | 75,198 | 45.89% | 163,848 |
| Gloucester | 11,693 | 66.60% | 4,869 | 27.73% | 225 | 1.28% | 752 | 4.28% | 18 | 0.10% | 6,824 | 38.87% | 17,557 |
| Hudson | 101,759 | 59.58% | 62,637 | 36.67% | 5,454 | 3.19% | 34 | 0.02% | 909 | 0.53% | 39,122 | 22.91% | 170,793 |
| Hunterdon | 7,443 | 54.38% | 6,067 | 44.33% | 76 | 0.56% | 80 | 0.58% | 20 | 0.15% | 1,376 | 10.05% | 13,686 |
| Mercer | 29,626 | 63.46% | 15,713 | 33.66% | 1,169 | 2.50% | 69 | 0.15% | 106 | 0.23% | 13,913 | 29.80% | 46,683 |
| Middlesex | 29,334 | 69.70% | 11,618 | 27.60% | 848 | 2.01% | 139 | 0.33% | 149 | 0.35% | 17,716 | 42.09% | 42,088 |
| Monmouth | 28,818 | 68.07% | 12,975 | 30.65% | 291 | 0.69% | 162 | 0.38% | 90 | 0.21% | 15,843 | 37.42% | 42,336 |
| Morris | 20,686 | 71.50% | 7,256 | 25.08% | 578 | 2.00% | 284 | 0.98% | 127 | 0.44% | 13,430 | 46.42% | 28,931 |
| Ocean | 6,840 | 74.84% | 2,138 | 23.39% | 96 | 1.05% | 53 | 0.58% | 12 | 0.13% | 4,702 | 51.45% | 9,139 |
| Passaic | 42,692 | 72.08% | 11,873 | 20.05% | 4,153 | 7.01% | 108 | 0.18% | 399 | 0.67% | 30,819 | 52.04% | 59,225 |
| Salem | 7,638 | 66.50% | 3,483 | 30.33% | 98 | 0.85% | 253 | 2.20% | 13 | 0.11% | 4,155 | 36.18% | 11,485 |
| Somerset | 10,962 | 71.02% | 4,192 | 27.16% | 163 | 1.06% | 80 | 0.52% | 38 | 0.25% | 6,770 | 43.86% | 15,435 |
| Sussex | 5,224 | 58.75% | 3,516 | 39.54% | 42 | 0.47% | 97 | 1.09% | 13 | 0.15% | 1,708 | 19.21% | 8,892 |
| Union | 39,409 | 72.57% | 12,103 | 22.29% | 2,353 | 4.33% | 122 | 0.22% | 316 | 0.58% | 27,306 | 50.28% | 54,303 |
| Warren | 8,035 | 51.23% | 7,218 | 46.02% | 192 | 1.22% | 202 | 1.29% | 36 | 0.23% | 817 | 5.21% | 15,683 |
| Totals | 611,451[b] | 67.65% | 256,887 | 28.42% | 27,192[b] | 3.01% | 4,674[b] | 0.52% | 3,640 | 0.40% | 354,564 | 39.23% | 903,844 |
State and district results of the1920 United States presidential election | ||
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