# 1908 Presidential Election [[William Howard Taft]] (Republican), [[Theodore Roosevelt]]'s hand-picked successor and former Secretary of War, defeated [[William Jennings Bryan]] (Democrat) in Bryan's **third and final** presidential campaign. Taft won 321 to 162 electoral votes, 51.6% to 43.0% in the popular vote. Bryan ran on a substantially more conventional progressive Democratic platform (no longer free-silver-centered) but still could not overcome the structural Republican advantage in the post-1896 alignment. Bryan's three-time losing record (1896, 1900, 1908) made him one of the most-defeated major-party presidential candidates in American history. ## Result - **[[William Howard Taft]]** (Republican) — 321 electoral votes, 51.6% popular - **[[William Jennings Bryan]]** (Democrat) — 162 electoral votes, 43.0% popular - Eugene V. Debs (Socialist) — 0 electoral votes, 2.8% popular - Total: 483 electoral votes ## Right-wing relevance The 1908 election's right-wing relevance is principally as the *prelude to the 1912 Republican rupture*. Taft's Republican coalition was structurally the same as McKinley's and Roosevelt's; the disintegration of that coalition in the 1909–1912 period — over conservation policy, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, and personal conflict between Roosevelt and Taft — produced the Bull Moose split that delivered the 1912 election to Wilson and effectively ended the Republican Party's grip on national power for the eight Wilson years. ## Connections - [[William Howard Taft]] — Winner; TR's chosen successor. - [[Theodore Roosevelt]] — Outgoing president; political patron. - [[William Jennings Bryan]] — Lost for the third and final time. ---