1912 United States presidential election in Michigan

The 1912 United States presidential election in Michigan took place on November 5, 1912, as part of the 1912 United States presidential election. Voters chose 15 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

Following the Panic of 1893 and the Populist movement, Michigan would turn from a competitive Republican-leaning state into a rigidly one-party polity dominated by the Republican Party. The dominance of the culture of the Lower Peninsula by anti-slavery Yankees would be augmented by the turn of formerly Democratic-leaning German Catholics away from that party as a result of the remodelled party’s agrarian and free silver sympathies, which became rigidly opposed by both the upper class and workers who followed them. The state Democratic Party was further crippled via the Populist movement severing its critical financial ties with business and commerce in Michigan as in other Northern states. A brief turn of the strongly evangelical Cabinet Counties toward the Populist movement in the 1896 presidential election would reverse itself following the return to prosperity under President William McKinley, so that these joined in Republican hegemony until the Great Depression.

In the 1894 elections, the Democratic Party lost all but one seat in the Michigan legislature, and the party would only make minor gains there for the next third of a century. Unlike the other states of the Upper Midwest, the Yankee influence on the culture of the Lower Peninsula was so strong that left-wing third parties did not provide significant opposition to the Republicans, nor was there more than a moderate degree of coordinated factionalism within the hegemonic Michigan Republican Party.

The state was not seriously affected by the split within the nationally dominant Republican Party during the Taft presidency. Only two of its ten Republican Congressmen were amongst the “Insurgents” who aligned with a revived Democratic Party. However, during 1911 state Governor Chase Osborn became one of the first politicians to work for a return of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House, and would soon call for both incumbent President Taft and rival progressive Robert M. La Follette to withdraw for Roosevelt to gain the nomination outright. Roosevelt would also soon gain the support of state party leader Frank Knox, although Taft supporters would dominate the state at actual party conventions. The state’s few Democratic delegates backed eventual nominee, Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson of Virginia.

Former president Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Party campaigned extensively in the state during October but early polls had Wilson making a close race even in this most Republican of states. Indeed, during October the state was viewed as close between Roosevelt and Wilson, or even seeing Wilson ahead. However, Michigan was actually comfortably won by Roosevelt and running mate governor of California Hiram Johnson, with 38.95 percent of the popular vote, against the incumbent president William Howard Taft (R–Ohio), and running mate Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, with 27.63 percent of the popular vote. Wilson and running mate governor of Indiana Thomas R. Marshall finished third with 27.36 percent.

Analysis
Michigan was one only two states where Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson came in third behind former president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt and the current president of the United States William Howard Taft — the only other such state being Vermont where Wilson finished a much more distant third. Since 1912 there has been only one occasion (Bill Clinton in Utah in 1992) where a winning presidential candidate finished third in any non-Confederate state.

, this is the last election in which Ottawa County, Sanilac County, and Missaukee County did not support the Republican candidate. This was the first time since 1852 that Michigan voted for a non-Republican presidential candidate, and the only time Michigan ever voted for a third-party presidential candidate.

With 38.95 percent of the popular vote, Michigan would prove to be Roosevelt's third-strongest state in terms of popular vote percentage in the 1912 election after South Dakota (where Taft was not on the ballot) and California (where Taft was a write-in candidate).