The 1908 United States presidential election in North Carolina took place on November 3, 1908. All contemporary 46 states were part of the 1908 United States presidential election. North Carolina voters chose 12 electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president.
North Carolina was won by the Democratic nominees, former Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska and his running mate John W. Kern of Indiana. They defeated the Republican Party nominees, William Howard Taft and his running mate James S. Sherman of New York. Bryan won the state by a margin of 8.73%.
Although, like all former Confederate states, North Carolina would during its “Redemption” develop a politics based upon Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement of its African-American population and dominance of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party possessed sufficient historic Unionist white support from the mountains and northwestern Piedmont to gain a stable one-third of the statewide vote total in general elections even after blacks lost the right to vote. After the failure of Theodore Roosevelt to reconcile with the South, new nominee Taft would in October become the first Republican candidate to tour the South. Aided by opposition by developing manufacturers to Bryan’s populism, and by his willingness to accept black disfranchisement alongside a completely “lily-white” state GOP that even excluded blacks from membership Taft gained substantially upon Theodore Roosevelt’s performance in 1904, especially in previously Democratic western and Piedmont counties. He was the first Republican to ever carry Cabarrus County and Catawba County – which would become solidly Republican after World War I and among thirteen Tar Heel counties to back Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson – and also Jackson County.
Bryan had previously won North Carolina against William McKinley in both 1896 and 1900.
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