The
1916 United States Presidential election was the 33rd quadrennial United States Presidential election, held on November 7, 1916 to elect the electors to choose the President of the United States. The incumbent President, Charles Evans Hughes of the Liberal Party, did not seek a second term; the Secretary of State in his Cabinet, Elihu Root, defeated the Democratic nominee, former Senator George McClellan Jr. It was the second consecutive election in which both nominees were New Yorkers and the fourth straight election in which the Democrats nominated a New Yorker as their candidate; it was also the first election since 1880 in which an incumbent President elected not to seek reelection after being elected to a single term of their own right, an the first time since 1876 that in such a situation the party holding the Presidency retained it.
The previous three years had been defined by the Great American War, which began in September of 1913 with the invasion of Maryland by the Confederate States and the evacuation of the federal government to Philadelphia after six months of deteriorating negotiations; as such, Hughes had served almost exclusively as a war President for his entire term. After the Confederacy achieved its high-water mark in early 1914, the rest of the war was a steady advance by the United States and her allies against the Confederacy and her allies in Mexico and South America, punctuated by disastrous defeats on land at Nashville and at sea at Hilton Head by the CSA in May of 1915. Shortly before the conventions for both parties began in July 1916, the Confederate capital of Richmond and its chief logistics node at Atlanta both fell, and Hughes - exhausted mentally and physically from three years of war - was confident enough in ensuing victory to elect to not seek another term.
While Liberals expected that the pending victory would deliver them a historic landslide, as would the solid public reputation of their compromise candidate in Root - who had served in four Cabinet offices over the previous twenty-four years - McClellan ran a spirited campaign while Root, at 71 the oldest nominee in American history, preferred a laid-back operation reminiscent of the "front-porch campaigns" of the 19th century from his townhome in Philadelphia as he continued in his diplomatic duties there, and with turnout relatively low due to the war, his popular vote margin was much narrower than expected even as he more or less mirrored Hughes' comfortable, but not overwhelming, electoral vote margin of four years prior. The result, in which New York was once again the decisive state and which Root won by less than his national margin, once again raised concerns about the criticality of that state in national elections as effectively forcing New Yorkers upon both parties (and, to a lesser extent, Ohioans as running mates), and the 1916 elections were the penultimate contest to use the electoral college rather than a pure popular vote system. Despite rumors
[1] that Hughes would resign to allow Root to take the Presidency early to avoid a wartime transition, the Confederacy sued for peace four days later - November 11, now celebrated as Victory Day - and Root would preside over the peace negotiations as his inauguration approached, at which point, at 72 years old, he became the oldest President at the time of his inauguration, a record that would stand for sixteen years.
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@GDIS Pathe
[1] There's a rumor that Wilson pondered doing this in the event that Hughes beat him in 1916; since Hughes and Root are co-partisans, there's even less reason Hughes would do this than Wilson, and the reasons why Wilson wouldn't have done this are plentiful, too.