Why did FDR do so ridiculously well in the Pacific States in 1936?

[mianfei]

New Deal public works, most especially such developments as Grand Coulee Dam and the water projects on the Sacramento and San Joaquin, seem to me the most likely reason. With drought having been persistent in the West throughout most of the 1920s (1923/1924, 1928/1929, and 1930/1931 were very bad “rain years”, as was 1933/1934 in the south with a remarkably warm winter) people were desperate for water security in the drier parts and for infrastructure in the wetter areas.

FDR’s success was replicated all over the West: west of the Continental Divide Alf Landon won only rock-ribbed Kane County, Utah, along with Clark County, Idaho and Rio Blanco County, Colorado. This despite the fact that on the eastern slopes Landon – aided by his support for Prohibition – took many counties won by FDR in 1932.

Before 1932, hostility towards the Democratic Party was very widespread in Western Oregon and Western Washington due to its association with Catholicism and the Confederacy in what was even them the most secular, “Scandinavian” region of the country. In 1928, Washington was the fourth most Republican state in the nation and California the eighth most Republican, although Al Smith did carry four presumably Catholic slope counties (Amador, El Dorado, Placer and Plumas, of which the latter pair were very solid Republican from 1860 to 1908). This hostility – though chipped at mildly by Bryan and Wilson – was really only broken by FDR in the desperation of drought, alternating very mild and cold winters, and severe economic depression. Then, the mountainous West offered opportunities for public works development (chiefly dams) largely absent in the East.

[mianfei]

San Francisco went for Smith, Wilson, and Cleveland (in the case of 1892, that was the flipping point)

That’s true, of course, but San Francisco was much more cosmopolitan than coastal counties to its north and south, and had been more Democratic ever since the Civil War.

Counties north from Mendocino were as firmly anti-Catholic as Western Oregon and Western Washington – Humboldt County voted Republican in every election from 1864 to 1928 and Smith received only 28 percent there.

Wow: FDR won Grant County, WA by 22 points in 1932. He won it by 73 points in 1936.

Grant County is where Grand Coulee Dam is located – no wonder those without jobs or merely fearing their security flocked to Roosevelt with such opportunities in hydropower and irrigation!

Even more amazing is that in 1936 FDR got 73.06 percent in Adams County, Washington – yet no Democrat, not even Johnson in 1964, has ever won there since Willkie carried Adams in 1940! In constrast, in island San Juan County where there were no massive public works projects, Roosevelt received just 48.59 percent of the vote (to Landon’s 43.26 percent or 5 percent above his nationwide vote share).

The following three articles:

• ‘The Political Economy of New Deal Spending: An Econometric Analysis’ by Gavin Wright from The Review of Economics and Statistics, v1olume 56, issue 1 (February 1974) and
• ‘A Statistical Analysis of New Deal Economic Programs in the Forty-Eight States, 1933-39’ (1972 thesis) by Donald Reading
• ‘Electoral Incentives, Public Policy, and the New Deal Realignment’ by Robert K. Fleck, from Southern Economic Journal, volume 65, issue 3 (1999)

demonstrate clearly how the New Deal targeted the West because of the higher standard deviation of its Democratic vote preference, enabling Roosevelt to maintain power. Once the Democratic Party’s congressional fortunes declined with the 1938 midterm elections, Roosevelt could not keep up this policy.