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Posting maps of each state's Partisan Voter Index for every election https://t.co/CLcpWHtWIM

Jul 18, 2021, 7 tweets

#ElectionTwitter Here's a map that I made of Theodore Roosevelt's performance by county as the presidential candidate for the Progressive party in 1912. Roosevelt received 27% of the popular vote, which is the best showing for a third-party candidate in American history.

From comparing the 1912 results to the Free Soil Party's performance in 1848, it becomes apparent that Roosevelt won a lot of Yankee-settled areas in the Midwest that were Republican strongholds

Roosevelt also did very well with Scandinavian voters, enabling him to win over 50% of the vote in counties like Kittson and Marshall in northwest Minnesota that were majority-Scandinavian, while also winning pluralities in the heavily Norwegian Lake Superior lowland in Wisconsin

In the South, Roosevelt won a substantial amount of votes in Unionist areas like East Tennessee and southern Kentucky that were bastions of Republican strength in the region.

Roosevelt seems to have done well in Republican areas full of ethnic Germans, like Gillespie county in Texas and McIntosh & Mercer in North Dakota. Furthermore, Roosevelt did very well in areas with a substantial amount of Dutch inhabitants. Maybe his Dutch heritage helped him?

Notably, Roosevelt did poorly in Utah & southern Idaho, where Mormons backed the incumbent Taft. Also, Robert LaFollette's refusal to endorse Roosevelt caused many Wisconsin progressives to back Wilson instead.

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