Then Again: VT Republicans predicted a Landon landslide in 1936 — oops!

Jessica Tate

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The Springfield Reporter breaks the news to Vermonters that President Roosevelt won reelection in 1936 by a landslide, though a majority of Vermont voters had voted against him. The Vermont GOP fared better, sweeping statewide offices, as usual.

A group of young men gathered on the night of Nov. 3, 1936, to listen to election results on the radio. This was a presidential election year, so in addition to the usual statewide races, Vermonters were eager to hear whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be returning to office. 

The election was essentially a referendum on Roosevelt’s New Deal, his plan to combat the Great Depression.

The young men met at the home of R.J. Mayo, an undertaker in Randolph, who along with his wife was out for the evening. If the men were typical Vermonters, then most or perhaps all of them opposed Roosevelt. Vermont was as solidly Republican as a state could get, siding with the Republican presidential candidate ever since there was a Republican Party.

As the night wore on, the men felt that something was going wrong — not with Vermont, which was still proving reliably Republican, but with the rest of the nation, which was falling state after state into Roosevelt’s column. 

It was more than one of the men could take. Friends recalled later that 25-year-old Watson Dadmun of Randolph was visibly shaken by the reports issuing from the radio. Sometime around midnight, he snapped. He darted outside, smashed one of the Mayos’ windows, then ran to his nearby home and returned with the shotgun he had used earlier that day to hunt raccoons. 

The other young men and Mayo’s housekeeper, a Miss Call, tried to persuade Dadmun to drop the gun. At one point, they managed to snatch it away from him, but he got it back and ran out into the garden, where he shot himself in the stomach. 

Dadmun’s friends summoned a doctor and Mrs. Mayo, then borrowed the Mayo ambulance (the family also operated the local ambulance service) to race Dadmun to Gifford Memorial Hospital. Doctors prepared a blood transfusion for Dadmun, but he died in the operating room before it could be administered.

The election result was seemingly the last straw for a troubled young man. But how could Roosevelt’s election, which came in a massive national landslide, have been such a shock? Surely Vermonters saw it coming, right?

The answer is yes and no. It depended on whom they trusted. 

A GOP stronghold

Shortly before the election, national campaign officials for the Republicans and the Democrats were claiming optimism. The day before the election, the main front page headline of the Rutland Herald blared: “Both Sides Are Confident.” 

John P. Davis, chairman of the Republican State Committee, declared that Vermont would do as it always did, vote Republican, by backing that year’s candidate, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon. During the previous presidential election, Vermonters had cast 22,000 more votes for the eventual loser, Republican Herbert Hoover, than they had for Roosevelt. 

This time around, Davis predicted, Republicans who had been lured away by Roosevelt in 1932 would return and Landon would win the state by about 40,000 votes.

Shortly before the 1936 presidential election, a survey of voters by a leading national magazine predicted that Kansas Gov. Alf Landon would win the presidency. Wikimedia Commons

But some Democrats claimed confidence that their candidate could win Vermont. Patrick F. Howley, director of the party’s efforts in Vermont, said Roosevelt had a “reasonable” chance of carrying the state. 

However, Howley was contradicted by James A. Farley, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who admitted that Republicans had good reason to like their chances in Vermont, as well as Maine. But that was all, he said. Roosevelt, he predicted, would carry the rest of the nation, a bold but prescient claim. 

Going into the election, Republicans had had cause for optimism. In a time before our current fixation on polling, politicians relied heavily on precedents. 

Republicans noted that their candidates had performed well in Maine during state elections that September. Those victories were seen as a sign of things to come. Maine was considered a bellwether state, since political trends there tended to be replicated on the national level. The old saying went, “As goes Maine, so goes the nation.” 

The Literary Digest

Another bellwether was the Literary Digest survey, which had accurately predicted every presidential winner since the survey was instituted 25 years earlier. The popular general-interest magazine conducted an unscientific survey, sending questionnaires to its subscribers. More than 2.3 million responded. 

The results tipped heavily for Landon, who won roughly 1.3 million votes to Roosevelt’s 973,000. (Landon took nearly three-quarters of the Vermont vote in the magazine’s survey, winning 7,241 to 2,438.) 

The magazine put out a statement noting that its 1932 presidential survey had overestimated Roosevelt’s victory margin. In the same way, the magazine noted, it might be overstating Landon’s, but “we see no reason for supposing so.” 

A banner for President Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

If the Literary Digest’s numbers held true, Landon would win 366 electoral votes to only 165 for Roosevelt. (In reality, Landon would actually win just eight electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 523.)

Vermonters read stories in their newspapers about the Literary Digest survey. And they talked with their friends about politics. If most of the people they spoke with were fellow Vermonters, they probably felt the Literary Digest had the voters’ mood about right. 

After all, for generations Vermonters had backed Republicans, giving the GOP a monopoly on power in the state. In fact, Vermont wouldn’t vote for a Democratic presidential candidate until Lyndon Johnson in 1964. 

On the day of Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide, Vermont Republican office seekers must have been relieved they were running in Vermont, where it was still advantageous to be a Republican. Members of the GOP took every statewide office, from governor on down to attorney general and auditor of accounts. 

Republican Charles Plumley of Northfield won Vermont’s race for Congress that year. George Aiken, then the lieutenant governor, won the gubernatorial race handily, taking the popular vote in 12 of 14 counties. 

That was one better than Landon, who won a majority of votes in every county except Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle.

The day after the election, the Barre Daily Times editorialized about how the election result had confounded so many experts. “(W)hat are we to say about the Literary Digest’s presidential straw vote,” the paper asked, “and about that old shibboleth ‘as goes Maine so goes the nation’?”

Soon, some wag updated the expression to explain the election: It was now simply, “as goes Maine, so goes Vermont.”