1916 United States presidential election
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Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 7, 1916. The Democratic ticket of incumbent President Woodrow Wilson and incumbent Vice President Thomas Marshall defeated the Republican ticket of former associate justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes and former Vice President Charles Fairbanks by a narrow margin. Wilson was the first incumbent Democrat since 1832 to win re-election to a second consecutive term. In June, the 1916 Republican National Convention chose Hughes as a compromise between the conservative and progressive wings of the party. Hughes was on the Supreme Court in 1912 and was not involved in the bitter politics of that year. He defeated John W. Weeks, Elihu Root, and several other candidates on the third ballot. While conservative and progressive Republicans had been divided in the 1912 election between the candidacies of incumbent President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt, they largely united around Hughes in his bid to oust Wilson. Hughes remains the only person to have served as a Supreme Court justice and later been a major party's presidential nominee. Wilson was renominated at the 1916 Democratic National Convention, as was Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, both without opposition. Hughes's running mate was Charles W. Fairbanks, who had been Theodore Roosevelt's vice president in his second term. Although many saw Hughes as the favorite to win, Wilson defeated him by nearly 600,000 votes out of about 18.5 million cast in the popular vote. Wilson secured a narrow majority in the Electoral College by sweeping the Solid South and winning several swing states with razor-thin margins. Wilson won California, the decisive state, by just 3,773 votes. Since the GOP was not as split as in 1912, Wilson did not have the same easy victory as he had four years earlier, losing his home state of New Jersey along with the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Marshall's home state of Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia (although he still won an electoral vote from the state), and Wisconsin. However, Wilson still managed to win two states that he had lost in 1912 (Utah and Washington), and fully won California after having only obtained two out of 13 electoral votes from California in 1912. The Socialist party under Allan L. Benson received 3.19% of the vote. This resulted in no candidate securing a majority in California, Washington, North Dakota, or New Hampshire, with the Prohibition party also receiving 1.19% of the vote.