Why not 1924. The gap in terms of popular vote between the two major parties are wider than all the elections you have listed. Of course 1924 is somewhat of a special election for me. This is one election where I really like both major party candidates. I am real fan of both Coolidge and Davis.
It’s probable that without the third-party La Follette candidacy, Coolidge would have won something like 65—35, which would easily beat any actual popular vote percentage. Still, although Davis did worse than any other Democratic nominee in popular votes – in California, North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin he received fewer than ten percent of the votes, which no other on-ballot Democratic nominee has ever done – his losing margin was marginally less than Cox’s in 1920.
To my mind, it is a choice between 1920 and 1972, simply because Nixon and Harding dominated the country to an extraordinary extent. Outside antebellum slave states and Oklahoma, Cox carried a mere
forty-one of over sixteen hundred counties! In only eleven “free” states did Harding lose a single county, and in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Montana Cox did not get an absolute majority in any of his six counties (Columbia, Greene and Monroe in PA, Manistee in Michigan, Clark in Nevada and Mineral in Montana). Moreover, as others have noted the Republicans gained huge margins in Congress.
In 1972, Nixon almost, but not quite, replicated Harding’s free-state dominance over the whole country: McGovern won only 130 counties nationwide (plus D.C. and several equivalents in Alaska) and won many of those by very small margins. Fewer than twenty counties gave McGovern sixty percent of their vote, and only
two (Duval in Texas, Shannon in South Dakota) over seventy percent. McGovern was considered so radical he had trouble winning many black counties, and Nixon gained over 45 percent in the only two remaining “never voted Republican” counties of Brooks and Jim Hogg in South Texas (by contrast, Reagan did not manage 30 percent in those two counties). However, the 1972 vote was anti-McGovern, not anti-Democratic
per se, and there was very limited coattails for Nixon.
1964 was, like 1972, a vote against the man. The Northeast many have been unable to take Goldwater’s policies, but state-level Republicans held up and more crucially, Goldwater did hold large numbers of rock-ribbed Republican counties everywhere bar the Northeast – although he did so by margins much smaller than usual in countless cases, most strikingly in famously Republican Leslie County, Kentucky where LBJ’s 47 percent more than doubled the previous best by a Democrat.
1936 needs to be set in context of a huge landslide from 1932: although FDR gained in the big cities and the public works-drenched West, Landon actually started rebuilding the GOP elsewhere and held traditional Republican bastions very firmly – e.g. in the previously noted Leslie County Landon got the customary 80 percent plus – whilst he captured 203 counties mainly in the Plains to provide a basis for much more striking gains by Willkie in 1940.
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