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531 electoral votes of the Electoral College 266 electoral votes needed to win |
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Turnout | 61.0% 4.1 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential election results map. Blue denotes those won by Roosevelt/Garner, red denotes states won by Landon/Knox. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt
Democratic
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Democratic
The United States presidential election of 1936 was the thirty-eighth quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 1936. In terms of electoral votes, it was the most lopsided presidential election in the history of the United States. In terms of the popular vote, it was the second-biggest victory for the winner since the election of 1820, which was not seriously contested.
The election took place as the Great Depression entered its eighth year. Incumbent President and Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt was still working to push the provisions of his New Deal economic policy through Congress and the courts. However, the New Deal policies he had already enacted, such as Social Security and unemployment benefits, had proven to be highly popular with most Americans. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent was Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, a political moderate.
Although some political pundits predicted a close race, Roosevelt went on to win the greatest electoral landslide since the beginning of the current two-party system in the 1850s. Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont, which together could only return eight electoral votes. By winning 523 electoral votes, Roosevelt received 98.49% of the electoral vote total, the highest percentage since the uncontested election of 1820. Roosevelt also won the largest number of electoral votes recorded at that time, only surpassed by Ronald Reagan in the election of 1984, when there were seven more electoral votes available to contest. In addition, Roosevelt won 60.8% of the national popular vote, the second highest popular-vote percentage won (the highest percentage was won by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964).