1932 United States presidential election in Alabama

The 1932 United States presidential election in Alabama took place on November 8, 1932, as part of the nationwide presidential election. Alabama voters chose eleven representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president. In Alabama, voters voted for electors individually instead of as a slate, as in the other states.

Since the 1890s, Alabama had been effectively a one-party state ruled by the Democratic Party. Disenfranchisement of almost all African-Americans and a large proportion of poor whites via poll taxes, literacy tests and informal harassment had essentially eliminated opposition parties outside of Unionist Winston County and a few nearby northern hill counties that had been Populist strongholds. The only competitive statewide elections became Democratic Party primaries that were limited by law to white voters. Unlike most other Confederate states, however, soon after black disenfranchisement Alabama’s remaining white Republicans made rapid efforts to expel blacks from the state Republican Party. Indeed under Oscar D. Street, who ironically was appointed state party boss as part of the pro-Taft “black and tan” faction in 1912, the state GOP would permanently turn “lily-white”, with the last black delegates from the state at any Republican National Convention serving in 1920.

The 1920 election, aided by isolationism in Appalachia and the whitening of the state GOP, saw the Republicans gain their best presidential vote share in Alabama since 1884, while the GOP even exceed forty percent in the House of Representatives races for the 4th, 7th and 10th congressional districts. However, isolationist sentiment in Appalachia would ease after the election of Warren G. Harding while funding issues meant the Republicans would not emulate their efforts in the rest of the decade.

Then in 1928, a virtual “civil war” broke out in the state Democratic Party over the nomination of Al Smith, as the hegemonic Democratic Party was placed in a quandary over the nomination of an urban, Catholic, racial liberal. The loyalists centred in the Black Belt supported Smith and the traditional Democratic Party as the best route to maintaining absolute white supremacy through encouraging capital investment, whereas the “Hoovercrats” led by former leaders of the Ku Klux Klan backed Republican Herbert Hoover and were intensely focused on nativism, Prohibition and Protestant fundamentalism.

After Smith narrowly carried the state, Hoovercrat leader James Thomas Heflin would not be renominated for the Senate in 1930, while the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression meant that this trend towards the GOP would be short-lived. The Depression had extremely severe effects in the South, which had the highest unemployment rate in the nation, and many Southerners blamed this on the North and on Wall Street, rejecting Hoover’s claim that the Depression’s causes were exogenous.

No campaigning was done in the state, and polls showed always that Democratic nominees Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Speaker John Nance Garner would re-establish the large margins by which the state had been won before 1928. An early October poll showed Roosevelt leading incumbent President Herbert Hoover and Vice President Charles Curtis by a nine-to-two majority. This poll underestimated the return of the Hoovercrats to the party, for Roosevelt won 84.74 percent of the vote to a mere 14.13 percent for Hoover.

This remains the only time in history that any presidential candidate has won every single county in Alabama, due to Roosevelt carrying Southern Unionist and reliably Republican Winston County by just a single vote.