1908 United States presidential election in Tennessee

The 1908 United States presidential election in Tennessee took place on November 3, 1908. All contemporary 46 states were part of the 1908 United States presidential election. Tennessee voters chose 12 electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president.

For over a century after the Civil War, Tennessee was divided according to political loyalties established in that war. Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the five West Tennessee Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne voted Republican – generally by landslide margins – as they saw the Democratic Party as the “war party” who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight. Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state’s secession was equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction. After the disfranchisement of the state’s African-American population by a poll tax was largely complete in the 1890s, the Democratic Party was certain of winning statewide elections if united, although unlike the Deep South Republicans would almost always gain thirty to forty percent of the statewide vote from mountain and Highland Rim support.

Tennessee was won by the Democratic nominees, former Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska and his running mate John W. Kern of Indiana. They defeated the Republican Party nominees, William Howard Taft and his running mate James S. Sherman of New York. Bryan won the state by a margin of 6.86%.

In October of 1908, Taft would in October become the first Republican candidate to tour the South, visiting Tennessee and North Carolina Aided by opposition by developing manufacturers to Bryan’s populism, and by his willingness to accept black disfranchisement Taft gained noticeably given the extremely deep-rooted partisan loyalties established by the Civil War. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt had lost Tennessee by 10.83 percent in 1904, Taft, although doing worse nationally, lost only by 6.86 percentage points.

Bryan had previously won Tennessee against William McKinley in both 1896 and 1900.