1952 United States presidential election in Tennessee

The 1952 United States presidential election in Tennessee took place on November 4, 1952, as part of the 1952 United States presidential election. Tennessee voters chose 11 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for 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 Western 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.

Between 1896 and 1948, the Republicans would win statewide contests three times but only in the second did they receive down-ballot coattails by winning three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP First and Second Districts. In the early 1910s, prohibitionist “Independent Democrats” fled the party and formed a coalition, known as the “Fusionists,” with Republicans to elect Ben W. Hooper Governor, whilst in 1920 the national anti-Wilson and anti-League of Nations tide allowed the GOP to carry a few traditionally Democratic areas in Middle Tennessee and with them the state, and in 1928 anti-Catholicism against Democratic nominee Al Smith gave this powerfully fundamentalist state to Herbert Hoover.

After the beginning of the Great Depression, however, for the next third of a century the Republicans would rarely contest statewide offices seriously despite continuing dominance of East Tennessee and half a dozen Unionist counties in the middle and west of the state. The Crump political machine that dominated state politics for a decade and a half, however, broke down in 1948 after Crump supported Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond but his own subordinates dissented knowing that a Democratic split would hand the state to the Republicans. Even Crump’s long-time ally Senator Kenneth D. McKellar broke with him, and a Middle Tennessee liberal, Estes Kefauver, won the state’s Senate seat. In 1949, after a failed effort six years before, Tennessee would substantially modify its poll tax and entirely abolish it two years later, largely due to the fact that the Crump machine had “block bought” voters’ poll taxes.

The abolition of the poll tax would, if not to the same extent as in South Carolina, substantially increase voter turnout in Tennessee. There was also the issue of the substantial Dixiecrat vote from 1948, especially with Thurmond’s endorsement of Republican nominees former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and California Senator Richard Nixon.

Analysis
Despite expectations that Democratic nominees Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II and running mate Alabama Senator John Sparkman had a slightly better chance of carrying the state, Tennessee would be won by Eisenhower with 49.99 percent of the popular vote, against Stevenson’s 49.71 percent. Eisenhower’s 0.28 percentage point victory was the first of three consecutive Republican victories in the state, as Tennessee would not vote Democratic again until Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964. The result deviated little from long-established partisan patterns, with Chester County — where Eisenhower was the first-ever Republican victor – the only county Eisenhower carried that neither Harding nor Hoover won. Nonetheless, whereas Harding’s and Hoover’s victories were based upon gains in Middle Tennessee, gains in the pro-Dixiecrat cotton counties of West Tennessee were most critical for Eisenhower: fifteen of the top twenty-four Thurmond counties were also amongst the top twenty-four in terms of Democratic loss since 1936.

This is the only presidential election since 1924 in which Tennessee voted differently than neighboring Kentucky.