1924 United States presidential election in Michigan

The 1924 United States presidential election in Michigan took place on November 4, 1924, as part of the 1924 United States presidential election. Voters chose fifteen representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

Ever since the Panic of 1893 and the Populist movement, Michigan had been rigidly one-party polity dominated by the Republican Party. In the 1894 elections, the Democratic Party lost all but one seat in the Michigan legislature, and over the four ensuing decades the party would never make major gains there. 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, while the Populist movement eliminated Democratic ties with the business and commerce of Michigan and other Northern states. By the 1920s, the only significant financial backer of the state Democratic Party was billionaire William Comstock.

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.

By taking a substantial proportion of the 1912 “Bull Moose” vote, incumbent president Woodrow Wilson would manage the best performance in Michigan by a Democrat since Grover Cleveland in 1888, but 1918 saw a major reaction against Wilson throughout the Midwest, due to supposed preferential treatment of Southern farmers. Republicans would hold every seat in the State Senate for over a decade after the fall election, as they had between 1895 and 1897 and between 1905 and 1911, and every seat in both houses of the state legislature between 1921 and 1923.

The only campaigning done in the state by any of the three major candidates – Republican Party incumbent Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, Democratic nominee John W. Davis of West Virginia and third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette Sr. of the Progressive Party — was a tour by conservative Southern Democrat Davis in September, during which he campaigned to eliminate the income tax burden of the poorer classes.

Analysis
The first poll taken showed it clearly that Coolidge would carry Michigan by a huge margin, although there was substantial debate as to whom the opposition vote would go — early polls had La Follette receiving twice as many votes as Davis, but Democratic spokesmen worried that the state’s few Democrats would desert to Coolidge said Davis would out-poll the Wisconsin Senator. Ultimately, Davis did out-poll the Wisconsin Senator, whose figures of around 20 percent in October would fall to only 10.51 percent of the vote on election day, whilst Coolidge carried Michigan with a percentage even higher than originally predicted and which surpassed Warren G. Harding’s record performance from 1920.

Coolidge carried Michigan with 75.37 percent of the popular vote. This remains the best performance in a presidential election in Michigan, and Coolidge emulated Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 and William Howard Taft in 1908 by carrying every county in the state. Michigan was to be Coolidge's second strongest state in the 1924 election in terms of popular vote percentage after his birth state of Vermont.

Democrat Davis gathered only 13.13 percent of the vote and did not pass one-third in any of Michigan’s eighty-three counties, whilst La Follette, who carried his neighbouring home state of Wisconsin and received over thirty percent in all other states of the Upper Midwest, received limited support in Michigan because it was less German and more Yankee and Polish than any other Midwestern state. La Follette’s best performance was in the heavily Finnish and anti-clerical Upper Peninsula, where he received forty-four percent in Delta County and over twenty percent in seven other counties in the western Upper Peninsula. However, in the more populous Lower Peninsula, La Follette exceeded his national vote share of 16.62 percent only in four of sixty-eight counties, and consequently the Wisconsin Senator won only 10.51 percent of Michigan’s total vote, making it his third-weakest state in the Midwest after heavily Southern-leaning Indiana and Missouri. As in 1920, the Republican presidential landslide was accompanied by a clean sweep of every seat in both houses of the State legislature.