# 1904 Presidential Election [[Theodore Roosevelt]]'s first election to a full term, after three and a half years in office following McKinley's assassination. TR defeated Democrat Alton B. Parker (a conservative New York judge selected to give the party a non-Bryan, non-silver candidate) 336 to 140 electoral votes, with a popular-vote margin of 18.8% — at the time the largest margin in any popular-vote contest since 1820. TR famously pledged election night that he would not seek another term in 1908 — a pledge he immediately came to regret and would partially undo by running for the 1912 nomination against his hand-picked successor [[William Howard Taft]]. ## Result - **[[Theodore Roosevelt]]** (Republican) — 336 electoral votes, 56.4% popular - **Alton B. Parker** (Democrat) — 140 electoral votes, 37.6% popular - Eugene V. Debs (Socialist) — 0 electoral votes, 3.0% popular - Total: 476 electoral votes ## Right-wing relevance The 1904 election's right-wing relevance is structural rather than substantive: it validated TR's Progressive-Era restructuring of the Republican Party (trust-busting, conservation, the [[Square Deal]]) at a national-electorate scale. Contemporary national-greatness conservatism claims this TR era as a foundational period; the libertarian and small-government right treats it as the proximate beginning of the regulatory-state error. ## Connections - [[Theodore Roosevelt]] — Reelected (first full-term win). ---