StateBoiler
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« on: September 16, 2020, 03:49:13 PM » |
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« edited: September 16, 2020, 03:53:06 PM by StateBoiler »
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General theory I've thought about but not developed fully:
Prohibition was a late 1800s/early 1900s minor political movement that was pretty statically held to by a segment of the population. If you use presidential election performance as a general marker, they received greater than 0.5% of the vote in 10 consecutive presidential elections with their peak in 1892, making them the longest lasting third party over that threshold in American history (post-Civil War: Socialists 8, Libertarians 4, Greens 3, Greenbacks 3, same is true if you shift to a 1% threshold)
1884 - John St. John 1.50%
1888 - Clinton Fisk 2.20%
1892 - John Bidwell 2.24%
1896 - Joshua Levering 0.90%
1900 - John Woolley 1.50%
1904 - Silas Swallow 1.92%
1908 - Eugene Chafin 1.71%
1912 - Eugene Chafin 1.38%
1916 - James Hanly 1.19%
1920 - Aaron Watkins 0.70%
After this point, prohibition killed the Prohibition Party as far as vote count, with the 1920 vote percentage dropping more than 40% from 1916.
It was a movement that was stronger with women than men, but the 19th Amendment for women's universal suffrage did not occur until August 1920. Coincidentally, this was 19 months after the 18th Amendment put prohibition into effect. The party's early platforms including a plank on women's suffrage. If you look at the results above, Levering in 1896 suffered a dip. This was when the party split in two over "only focusing on prohibition" versus "focus on other things as well", with Levering representing the former.
So my questions is if women's universal suffrage had come earlier, does prohibition likewise come earlier due to being more popular among the voting base (even if not Prohibition Party voters)? And what would the party's vote count have looked like with universal suffrage?
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