Election to the United States House of Representatives in 1912

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On November 5, 1912, the House of Representatives was elected in the United States . In the states of Maine and Vermont , the elections took place in September. The election was part of the general election to the 63rd United States Congress that year, in which a third of the US Senators were elected. The 1912 presidential election , won by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson , also took place at the same time .

At the time of the election, the United States consisted of 48 states ( New Mexico and Arizona had since been added). The number of MPs to be elected was 435. This number has persisted to this day. The distribution of seats was based on the 1910 census .

In the election, the Democrats were able to continue their triumphal march that had started two years earlier. They gained a further 61 seats and achieved a close two-thirds majority with 291 seats. On the other hand, despite the increase in the number of seats in the House of Representatives, Republicans had to give up 28 seats. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party had 9 seats. As in 1910, the main reason for the election result was the internal fragmentation of the Republicans. There was a progressive and a conservative wing there. President William Howard Taft , who was a member of the Conservative wing, failed to mediate between the two camps. The progressive wing was led by former President Theodore Roosevelt. After Roosevelt was not nominated as a presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention in 1912 as he had hoped, he founded the Progressive Party, which nominated him as a presidential candidate and in turn also nominated candidates for other political bodies, including the House of Representatives. This split the Republican Party into two parties. There were also rumors of corruption among the Republicans. The Democrats profited from these developments across the board. You won the presidential election with Woodrow Wilson and secured a majority in both houses of Congress.

Only men were entitled to vote and eligible for election. Women were still banned from voting at the federal level until 1920. In the southern states in particular, the right to vote was restricted by laws that linked the right to vote to a certain tax revenue. As a result, poor whites, but above all many African-Americans, were excluded from voting.

Election result

Total: 435 (394)

The results of the last election two years earlier are in brackets. Changes in the course of the legislative period that do not affect the elections themselves are not included in these figures, but are noted in the article on the 63rd Congress in the section on the members of the House of Representatives under the corresponding names of the representatives. The same applies to elections in states that joined the Union after the beginning of the legislative period. As a result, the sources sometimes contain different information, as changes during the legislative period were sometimes incorporated into the figures and sometimes not.

See also

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