Election to the United States House of Representatives in 1918

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On November 5, 1918, the House of Representatives in the United States was elected. In the state of Maine , the elections took place on September 9th. The election was part of the general election for the 66th United States Congress that year, which also elected a third of US Senators . Since the elections took place around the middle of the second term of office of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson ( Midterm Election ), they were also considered a vote on the previous policy of the President.

At the time of the election, the United States consisted of 48 states. The number of MPs to be elected was 435. The distribution of seats was based on the 1910 census .

In the election, the Democrats lost another 22 seats, continuing their downward trend from the last election. They only had 192 seats. On the other hand, the Republicans gained 25 seats and now had 240 seats. This gave them an absolute majority. The Progressive Party had meanwhile disbanded. Established by the Socialist Party of America , Victor L. Berger was charged with alleged insubordination and lack of loyalty under the Espionage Act and was not allowed to serve as a member of Congress. In these elections, a member of the Farmer Labor Party from Minnesota moved into the House of Representatives for the first time . The reason for the Republican election victory was, on the one hand, the disappointment of many voters about the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917, which was blamed on the Democrats and which was interpreted as a broken word, since the party had rejected such a step in 1916. In addition, there was increasing unpopularity on the part of President Wilson and a party internal split in the Democrats over questions of financing the war. At the time, prohibition was also an election issue .

In most states, only men were eligible to vote and eligible. With a few exceptions, women were excluded from federal elections 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 (435)

The results of the last election two years earlier are in brackets. Changes during the legislative period that do not affect the elections themselves are not included in these figures, but are noted in the article on the 66th Congress in the section on the members of the House of Representatives under the relevant 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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