Cast your ballot: The election of 1912

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I used to be quite certain about my support for Roosevelt in 1912. Certainly, without the benefit of hindsight, he is the candidate closest to my actual views (or at least, as close as one can be in an era where it was considered perfectly reasonable to deny women the votes and deprive African-Americans and other ethnic minorities of basic human rights). It becomes much more difficult with hindsight, however, because the First World War is on the horizon, and TR had some truly horrifying ideas about war. With that in mind, I would support Taft, or perhaps cast a protest vote for Debs. Wilson is an acceptable choice only in 1916, and then only if you're voting without hindsight and confining yourself to a choice of the two major parties.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I think this could be called as 1 Election where they was not a single conservative candidate & by then standards all were some degree liberal!

I'm not sure I buy this. It's certainly true that all four major candidates could be broadly categorized as reformers, that all four favored government action to correct imperfections in the existing political and economic society, and that all four were suspicious of the corrupting power of "organized money" but I'm not sure that alone is enough to qualify as liberalism. There is definitely a conservative, capitalist argument to be made for trust-busting and the Federal Reserve Bank; the fact that contemporary conservatives now castigate such policies on the grounds that "government=bad" does not diminish this. I certainly wouldn't brand Debs a "liberal" or bundle him in with the other three, and Roosevelt was deeply conservative on certain issues (most notably war and foreign policy).