# 1924 Presidential Election [[Calvin Coolidge]] (Republican), elevated to the presidency in August 1923 on [[Warren G. Harding]]'s death, won his own term in a landslide. Coolidge defeated Democrat John W. Davis (a corporate lawyer who had won the nomination on the **103rd ballot** of a deadlocked Democratic convention deeply divided over the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, and immigration) 382 to 136 electoral votes, 54.0% to 28.8%. Progressive Senator **[[Robert La Follette]]** ran on a third-party Progressive ticket, won his home state of Wisconsin's 13 electoral votes, and carried 16.6% of the popular vote — the last serious Progressive third-party run until perhaps the 2024 RFK Jr. campaign. The 1924 Democratic convention deadlock — running 17 days, requiring 103 ballots, fought over whether the platform would explicitly condemn the Klan (it did not, by a margin of 4 votes) — is the most catastrophic intra-party convention in American history and a structural symptom of the Democratic Party's pre-FDR fracture between its Southern-evangelical-rural wing and its Northern-Catholic-urban wing. ## Result - **[[Calvin Coolidge]]** (Republican) — 382 electoral votes, 54.0% popular (15,723,789 votes) - **John W. Davis** (Democrat) — 136 electoral votes, 28.8% popular - **Robert La Follette** (Progressive) — 13 electoral votes, 16.6% popular - Total: 531 electoral votes - Turnout: 48.9% — lowest since the 1820s ## Right-wing relevance The 1924 election validated the Harding-Coolidge "Return to Normalcy" Republican formula at the ballot box and gave Coolidge the mandate for what became the canonical 1920s conservative agenda: continued Mellon tax cuts, the **Immigration Act of 1924** (Johnson-Reed, with its explicit national-origins quota system), and minimal federal intervention. The contemporary right's invocation of "the 1920s prosperity" (as proof of low-tax, low-regulation, restricted-immigration policy success) implicitly rests on this 1924 mandate. The La Follette Progressive run is a recurring case study in third-party ceilings — 16.6% nationally, only one state's EV. ## Connections - [[Calvin Coolidge]] — Winner; first elected term. - [[Warren G. Harding]] — Predecessor; died August 1923. ---