The Bull Moose Election

5 November 1912

Theodore Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination to President Taft and ran anyway, as a Progressive. The split handed the election to Woodrow Wilson, who won 41.9% of the vote, 2,194 counties and 435 of 531 electoral votes. Roosevelt outpolled Taft, 27.4% to 23.2%, and carried 6 states; Taft carried Utah and Vermont. Eugene Debs, the Socialist, took 6.0% and carried 4 counties, in the Kansas coal field, the timber and iron country of northern Minnesota and the wheat country of North Dakota.

What happened

The land and the votes1912, share of each

Wilson won 41.9% of the popular vote but 74% of the counties, 70% of the land that voted and 435 of 531 electoral votes. Counties and land leave out the 3 ties.

“It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”Theodore Roosevelt, speaking in Milwaukee after he was shot, 14 October 1912

Print map (PDF) Full-resolution image

Sources. County returns from Wikipedia’s state results tables (each citing the state canvass; Connecticut and Rhode Island summed from towns), with Amlani & Algara, County-Level Presidential Returns 1868–2020, Harvard Dataverse doi:10.7910/DVN/DGUMFI, for Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, where Roosevelt and Debs are not separated by county; in Texas the winner of Gillespie and Kinney is from The Political Graveyard and the share is not known (shown as a plurality). Certified state totals and electoral votes from Wikipedia’s national results table; county lines in force on 5 November 1912 from the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (generalized). Lakes, cities and the modern coast: Natural Earth. Web Mercator; the printed map is Albers equal-area conic, standard parallels 29.5°N and 45.5°N.