1936 United States presidential election

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 3, 1936. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Democratic ticket of incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt and incumbent Vice President John Nance Garner defeated the Republican ticket of Kansas governor Alf Landon and newspaper editor Frank Knox in a landslide victory. Roosevelt won the highest share of the popular vote (60 %) and the electoral vote (98 %, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont) since the largely uncontested 1820 election. The sweeping victory consolidated the New Deal Coalition in control of the Fifth Party System. President Roosevelt and Vice President Garner were renominated without opposition. With the backing of party leaders, Landon defeated progressive Senator William Borah at the 1936 Republican National Convention to win his party's presidential nomination. The populist Union Party nominated Congressman William Lemke for president. The election took place as the Great Depression entered its eighth year. Roosevelt was still working to push the provisions of his New Deal economic policy through Congress and the courts. However, the New Deal policies he had already enacted, such as Social Security and unemployment benefits, had proven to be highly popular with most Americans. Landon, a political moderate, accepted much of the New Deal but criticized it for waste and inefficiency. Roosevelt went on to win the greatest electoral landslide since the rise of hegemonic control between the Democratic and Republican parties in the 1850s. Roosevelt took 60 % of the popular vote, while Landon won 36 % and Lemke won 1 %. Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont, which together cast eight electoral votes. He carried 523 electoral votes, 98 % of the total—the largest share of the Electoral College for a candidate since 1820, the second-largest number of raw electoral votes, and the largest ever for a Democrat. Roosevelt also won by the widest margin in the popular vote for a Democrat in history, although Lyndon Johnson would later win a slightly higher share of the popular vote in 1964, with 61 %. Roosevelt's 523 electoral votes marked the first of only three times in American history when a presidential candidate received over 500 electoral votes in a presidential election (the others being in 1972 and 1984) and made Roosevelt the only Democratic president to accomplish this feat.