1912 United States presidential election

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 1912. The Democratic ticket of governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey and governor Thomas Marshall of Indiana defeated the Republican ticket of incumbent President William Howard Taft and university president Nicholas Butler while also defeating the Progressive/"Bull Moose" ticket of former president Theodore Roosevelt and governor Hiram Johnson of California and the Socialist Party ticket of former Indiana state representative Eugene V. Debs and Milwaukee mayor Emil Seidel. Roosevelt served as president from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican, and Taft succeeded him with his support. Taft's conservatism angered Roosevelt, so he challenged Taft for the party nomination at the 1912 Republican National Convention. When Taft and his conservative allies narrowly prevailed, Roosevelt rallied his progressive supporters and launched a third-party bid. At the Democratic Convention, Wilson won the presidential nomination on the 46th ballot, defeating Speaker of the House Champ Clark and several other candidates with the support of William Jennings Bryan and other progressive Democrats. The Socialist Party renominated its perennial standard-bearer, Eugene V. Debs. The general election was bitterly contested by Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs. Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" platform called for social insurance programs, reduction to an eight-hour workday, and robust federal regulation of the economy. Wilson's "New Freedom" platform called for tariff reduction, banking reform, and new antitrust regulation. Incumbent Taft conducted a subdued campaign based on his platform of "progressive conservatism". Debs, who was attempting to gain widespread support for his socialist policies, claimed that Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft were all financed by different factions within the capitalist trusts, and that Roosevelt in particular was a demagogue using socialistic language in order to divert socialist policies up safe channels for the capitalist establishment. The Republican split enabled Wilson to win 40 states and a landslide victory in the electoral college with just 41 % of the popular vote, the lowest vote share for a victorious presidential candidate since 1860. Wilson was the first Democrat to win a presidential election since 1892 as well as the first presidential candidate to receive over 400 electoral votes in a presidential election – he is also the only candidate in any presidential election to receive 400 or more electoral votes without attaining an absolute majority of the popular vote. Roosevelt finished second with 88 electoral votes and 27 % of the popular vote. Taft took 23 % of the national vote and carried two states, Vermont and Utah; he won the lowest share of the popular vote of any Republican nominee in history. Debs, the fourth-place finisher, won no electoral votes but received 6% of the popular vote, which remains the highest percentage of the vote ever won by a Socialist candidate in the history of American presidential elections. In this election, more than one third of voters cast third-party votes, the greatest percentage of votes to have ever been cast for third-party candidates in an American presidential election. This was the last U . presidential election to date in which the second-placed candidate was neither a Republican nor a Democrat.