November 5, 1940: President Franklin D. Roosevelt Is Elected to a 3rd Term

November 5, 1940: President Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected to an unprecedented 3rd term as President. The Democrat defeats the Republican nominee, Wall Street lawyer Wendell L. Willkie, 449 Electoral Votes to 82, with 55 percent of the popular vote to 45.

Willkie wins only 10 States: His home State of Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and the 2 States that FDR ended up never winning in his 4 runs, Maine and Vermont.

Gee, maybe running a conservative businessman as their nominee for President isn't a good idea for the Republican Party. After all, they did it before with Herbert Hoover. Alas, they would do it again with both George Bushes, and Mitt Romney. Well, at least they haven't nominated another conservative businessman with no political experience whatsoever, and who was once a registered Democrat, but is actually a womanizer whose stances are all over the map. Wait a minute... Okay, unlike Donald Trump, Wendell Willkie was sane, and loved his country more than he loved himself.

Willkie also made a key mistake: He killed his considerable Convention momentum. As Richard Moe put it in his 2013 book Roosevelt's Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War, the nominees "had emerged from the conventions on a roughly equal political footing with the voters -- people had been attracted to the down-home charisma and nonpolitical freshness and honesty of the Republican, while the machinations in Chicago had reminded them of the president's propensity for manipulation."

But then Willkie, the last major-party nominee to keep up the pretense of "letting the office seek the man," instead of the other way around, delayed his official acceptance speech. Instead, on July 9, he went to the Broadmoor Hotel, a rich people's resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and stayed there for over a month. He wanted to get some rest after a difficult nomination campaign, but got little of, as pretty much everybody with some influence in the Republican Party wanted to meet with him.

By the time he made his official acceptance on August 17, in front of 150,000 people in his hometown of Elwood, Indiana -- population, then as now, about 8,000, and a "sundown town" where black people were not welcome after dark, but this was never used against him by the Democrats, still with a strong Southern influence -- "the Willkie Boom" had fizzled out, and the situation in Europe had gotten worse, playing into FDR's Commander-in-Chief hands. After that, FDR's re-election was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

And yet, FDR didn't see it that way. He was very nervous on Election Night at his Hudson River-side home in Hyde Park, Dutchess County, New York. At 7:00, he was alone in his study, except for the head of his Secret Service detail, Mike Reilly, and told him he didn't want to see anybody. "Including your family?" Reilly asked. FDR responded: "I said anybody." It was a rare moment of failure of confidence for the man whose seeming sureness boosted America's confidence. By 8:00, enough returns had come in that he could relax, mingle, and enjoy the fruits of his electoral labors.

Historian and polling expert Michael Barone, doing research for a book in the late 1980s, discovered that there was, indeed, reason to worry. He determined that if Roosevelt's percentage was dropped by 3.2 percent in every State, he still would have won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral Vote by the slimmest of margins. He essentially won because he won what were then the 16 most populous Counties in America, in the biggest of cities, including all 5 Boroughs of New York.

This split convinced liberals that they were "the real America"; but also convinced conservatives that the liberals only won because they got the votes of immigrants, Catholics, Jews, black people -- people who, in their minds, weren't wholly American; and, thus, they could also claim to be "the party of the real America."

If it wasn't for World War II raging in Europe and the threat of Adolf Hitler, FDR would not have run for a 3rd term. And, if he had, and had run only on his domestic record, the New Deal, which had eased the Great Depression tremendously but had still not produced prosperity after 7 1/2 years, he would have lost. And, had he retired after 2 terms, any other Democratic nominee, no matter what his experience, would not have had FDR's domestic or foreign record, and would have lost, even to an opponent as inexperienced as Willkie.

And it's not as if there was an obvious successor. Thanks to landslide losses in the Congressional elections of 1922, 1926, 1930, 1932, 1934 and 1936, the Republican Party had no one who was a credible 33rd President of the United States. Likewise, thanks to a landslide loss in the Congressional election of 1938, and FDR's mistrust of Vice President Jack Garner and Postmaster General Jim Farley, the Democratic Party didn't exactly have an heir presumptive, either.

Hitler had to be stopped. And no one else, in either party, had the experience and the judgment that was necessary to handle him.

We now know that Roosevelt was elected to a 4th term in 1944, despite the Republican whisper campaign -- correct, as it turned out -- that he was dying. Ironically, both Willkie and his running mate would die before the next term was out: Willkie of heart trouble on October 8, 1944, at age 52 (10 years younger than FDR); and Charles McNary, the Senate Minority Leader, from Oregon, of a brain tumor on February 25, 1944, at 69. FDR outlived both of them.

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November 5, 1940, like all modern American Election Days, was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL had no games scheduled for the day. So there were no scores on this historic day.