Texas Casts Its First Electoral Votes for a Republican: The 1928 Election in Texas (Nov 10, 2024)

by Scott Sosebee

When you read this, we will have just passed our nation’s quadrennial exercise of voting for the President of the United States. As I write this, I have no idea who will have won the current race, and for all I know, given the perceived closeness of the contest, when you read this it is possible that we still will not know who has been elected. However, I can, with some confidence given the electoral make-up of Texas, write that Texas will likely give its Electoral College votes in 2024 to the Republican candidate. I can say so confidently because Texas has not sided with the Democratic Party nominee for president since it narrowly gave its votes to Jimmy Carter in 1976, and in most elections since then the Republican candidate has won by a comfortable margin.

My colleague Brook Poston and I—Dr. Poston is our Presidential historian in the department—were discussing some election nuggets today, and we mused about when was the first time Texas did not give its votes to a Democrat. It dawned on us that it was earlier than we had thought, since Texas cast its ballots for Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928. Such an outcome was almost unimaginable for anyone who followed Texas politics or lived at the time because Texas was, in 1928, one of the most solid of the “Solid South” Democratic Party states. That is also somewhat difficult for many today to comprehend since Texas has been such a solidly Republican state for so long. But Texas was—for most of its history—a rock-ribbed Democratic majority state.

When Texas joined the Union in 1845 its political leanings mirrored those of the rest of the South; like them, Texas was essentially an almost universally Democratic Party state that had coalesced around the consensus unity issue of maintaining slavery and also upholding the concept of White superiority. After the Civil War and then the crucible of Radical Republican Reconstruction, Texas—again like the rest of the South—had returned to, and even strengthened, its ties to the Democratic Party. At that time, the Democrats were the “white man’s party,” the political arm of the southern apartheid system of Jim Crow. The average White Texan viewed Republicans with disdain; they were the party of “Northern Aggression,” the party of Reconstruction, and the party of African Americans. White Texans were Democrats and could not even fathom casting a vote for a Republican—any Republican.

The 1928 Election changed the dynamics of that obdurate view, if only for one election cycle. No Republican candidate in the elections between 1876 and 1924 had ever exceeded 25% of the total vote in Texas. The Election of 1924, one in which Republican Calvin Coolidge had comfortably won re-election to office, had seen Texas give less than 20% (19.77%) of its votes to the winner, which was a typical Republican performance in Texas. However, in 1924, Californian (by way of Iowa) Herbert Hoover would win Texas and its then twenty electoral votes with 51.77% of the vote, 26,000 votes more than the Democratic nominee, New Yorker Al Smith, on his way to the presidency. So, how and why did he capture Texas?

The South of the 1920s had remained just like the South of the 1850s had been, only without slavery; it was a bi-racial society with race as the dividing line, the “mechanism” that unified Whites of different classes in one political and social coalition. However, the 1910s and 1920s had added another element to how the South viewed society. The Progressive reform era—and its emphasis on increased governmental action to regulate business—had also introduced cultural reform ideas into the body politic. One of those was Prohibition. The consumption of alcohol had long been a divisive issue in the United States and movements that we could call part of “Temperance” were present as far back as when the nation was founded. Temperance, as the name suggests, was a social movement designed to limit the consumption of alcohol, one that largely turned on the idea that drunkenness was inimical to a healthy family life, healthy economic output, or a healthy society. Temperance had met with mixed success at best, but it had found its greatest adherents among women broadly and in the South regionally.

In the South, Temperance had found an ally in the growing religious movements of Fundamentalism, Literalism, and Evangelicalism. For this growing segment of Protestantism, the consumption of alcohol was a moral issue, and increasingly one of Biblical doctrine. That meant that the consumption of alcohol was something to be banned, not just an issue of persuasion to temper its use. Such new threads on alcohol, combined with other more stringent views on the evil of drink, led to the Prohibition Movement, which became a political campaign. If Temperance was a social and cultural movement, Prohibition was a political movement designed to pass laws to end the consumption of alcohol. In Texas, Prohibition found great support among the state’s Baptists and—to a lesser extent—Methodists, and also in the state’s rural areas where Fundamentalism had found its greatest adherents.

Nationally, Prohibition had also found a large following among not just religious Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, but also among some Progressive reformers. That, combined with some impetus from WWI, had led to the ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which outlawed the sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic spirits. However, the ratification of the new Amendment did not remove the issue from the political realm; there remained a strong faction in both parties that wanted to see Prohibition repealed, a movement that gained particular steam when the continued consumption of alcohol in the nation had led to an increase in crime. One of the largest factions that wanted repeal were Northern Democrats, particularly those who lived in the Northeast, and one of their greatest champions was New York Governor Alfred Smith.

There was another element of the time that worked against Smith in Texas. Like many other southern states, the majority of Texans—particularly rural Texans—were not just Protestants but militantly so, which meant that they viewed Catholics with, at best, suspicion and, in most cases, disdain. The divisions between the two Christian sects were many and most doctrinal, but one was also on the issue of Prohibition—Catholics tended to be “Wets”—and Al Smith was not only a “Wet” but a Catholic. For a majority of Texans, that was enough to vote against him, so in 1928 Texas, for the first time, gave its Electoral College votes to a Republican, not so much because they favored Herbert Hoover, but because they so disliked Al Smith. They would not do so again until 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower would repeat the feat.

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.