1920 United States presidential election in New Mexico

← 1916 November 2, 1920 1924 →

Nominee Warren G. Harding James M. Cox Party Republican Democratic Home state Ohio Ohio Running mate Calvin Coolidge Franklin D. Roosevelt Electoral vote 3 0 Popular vote 57,634 46,668 Percentage 54.68% 44.27%

County Results Harding   50–60%   60–70%   70–80% Cox   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%

President before election Woodrow Wilson Democratic Elected President Warren G. Harding Republican

The1920 United States presidential election in New Mexico took place on November 2, 1920. All contemporary forty-eight States were part of the1920 United States presidential election. Voters chose three electors to represent them in theElectoral College, which voted forPresident andVice President.

During the period betweenNew Mexico's annexation by the United States and statehood, the area was divided between largely Republican machine-run highland regions (which were a mix ofHispanos and Anglo migrants from the Midwest and Northeast) and its firmlySouthern Democrat and Baptist "Little Texas" region to the southeast.^[1] A split in the "Old Guard" of highland Republicanism meant that in the state's inaugural presidential election in1912Woodrow Wilson carried the state through overwhelming "Little Texas" and southern desert support overProgressiveTheodore Roosevelt and incumbentRepublicanWilliam Howard Taft.^[2] Four years later in1916, Wilson gained sufficient Progressive support to narrowly hold the state againstCharles Evans Hughes and the reunited Republican Party; however, in 1918, despite extremely low turnout due to theSpanish flu epidemic^[3] the reunited GOP regained considerable strength.^[2]

The following two years saw the Democratic Party's prospects decline still further due to skyrocketinginflation helping make President Wilson very unpopular^[4] – besides which the President also had major health problems that had left First LadyEdith effectively running the nation. Political unrest observed in thePalmer Raids and the "Red Scare" further added to the unpopularity of the Democratic Party, since this global political turmoil produced considerable fear of alien revolutionaries invading the country.^[5] However, owing to its Anglo population's ties to theSouthern United States, New Mexico was not nearly so isolationist asAppalachia orthe Midwest,^[6] but the state's farmers did come to believe that the old Confederacy was gaining preferential treatment – to its disadvantage – from the Democratic administration.^[7]

Neither Harding nor Cox campaigned in this electoral-vote-poor state; however, a powerful group of corporate Republicans campaigned extensively for Harding,^[8] as did SenatorAlbert Fall, who was a very close associate of the President-to-be. The corporate and "Old Guard" Republicans^[2] campaigned on a "Return to Normalcy" followingWorld War I and the tumult of theBolshevik Revolution and attempts to spread it across Europe.^[9]

New Mexico was won by Ohio SenatorWarren G. Harding, in a strong 10-percentage-point sweep against Ohio GovernorJames M. Cox.^[10] Despite this victory, New Mexico was still sixteen percentage points more Democratic than the nation at-large, because the internationalist and traditionally Democratic Plains regions remained extremely loyal to Cox, and Fall's campaign in urban Bernalillo County was so ineffective that that county actually swung 4 percentage points towards the Democrats amidst a national 29-percentage-point swing.

• Colfax
• Grant
• Guadalupe
• Otero
• San Juan
• Sandoval
• Sierra
• Union

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• United States presidential elections in New Mexico

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