Presidential Election 1940

After eight years in the presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had every intention to retire to Hyde Park, New York.  But, even though the Republican Great Depression was pretty much over, a new menace had forced his attention onto the world.  While the United States was not officially in the European war as we were practicing neutrality, the United States government and the Democratic Party needed the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to work with Great Britain and the Soviet Union to defeat Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Axis powers.

throughout the winter, spring, and summer; FDR kept the Democratic Party guessing as to whether he would run for an unprecedented third consecutive term for the presidency.  The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution limiting the term of president of the United States to no more than two full four terms to be elected or no more than ten years total.  There was disagreement between Roosevelt and his Vice President, John Nance Garner, a conservative Democrat from Texas who had broken from the President's more liberal policies during the second term.  The President dropped Garner from the ticket and decided to add his Secretary of Agriculture to the ticket as his running-mate.

As for the Republican Party, the front runners of Senator Robert A. Taft and a young District Attorney named Thomas E. Dewey were defeated on the sixth ballot by dark horse candidate Wendell Willkie.

Willkie, like Donald Trump after him was a businessman with no previous elective office experience.  Again, like Donald Trump, Willkie had been a member of the Democratic Party before he decided to run for President as a Republican.  In fact, Willkie seemed to be very much in favor of continuing the status quo of the New Deal of the 1930s.  What brought Wendell Willkie to the public eye was his criticism of FDR wanting to break up electrical power monopolies, and Willkie was the CEO of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation.  Commonwealth and Southern was a company that provided electricity to customers in 11 states.  When President Roosevelt brought the TVA to the Tennessee Valley, it was bringing not only cheap electricity to people in the Tennessee Valley, but also flood control.  Willkie felt that because the federal government was competing with companies like Commonwealth and Southern that the government had an unfair advantage over private companies like his, thus saying that the government should not compete with them.

In the end, mainly due to world events like the Blitzkrieg over England and the proven leadership of President Roosevelt, he won an unprecedented third term with 449 Electoral Votes or 54.7 percent of the popular vote to Willkie's 82 Electoral Votes or 44.8 percent of the popular vote.  The next time one Party served 12 years in a row would be the Presidential Election of 1988.

See also:

• Presidential Election 1940
• Presidential Election 1944
• Presidential Election 1948
• Presidential Election 1952
• Presidential Election 1956
• Presidential Election 1960
• Presidential Election 1964
• Presidential Election 1968
• Presidential Election 1972
• Presidential Election 1976
• Presidential Election 1980
• Presidential Election 1984
• Presidential Election 1988
• Presidential Election 1992
• Presidential Election 1996
• Presidential Election 2000
• Presidential Election 2004
• Presidential Election 2008
• Presidential Election 2012
• Presidential Election 2016
• Presidential Election 2020