RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Nobody was going to defeat Hoover. The reason why Smith got so many votes is that the South mostly stuck with him. Hoover picked off a few states on the edges of the South, but the old bedrock, hardshell Baptists and fundamentalists stuck with the Democrats.

Hoover's candidacy was actually very well received in the country at the time. In fact, he was a hero in many quarters because he literally saved parts of Northern Europe from starvation during after the end of World War One. Later, he would go on to do the same in Russia at the end of the Bolshevik revolution. In fact, someone asked Hoover why he was helping out the communists, who were against capitalism and our way of life. Hoover responded: "I don't care about their politics; people need to be fed". He was an engineer by trade. Much of his ability came from understanding organizations and logistical processes. Al Smith just couldn't compete, especially in rural and suburban areas. He did very well in the cities, but he picked a bad year to run. Anti-Catholic sentiment did him in somewhat, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the history book record it. Hoover benefited a lot from the strong economy at the time, and that's what ultimately sealed the deal for him. Hoover came into the White House with strong expectations that he would reduce poverty in the country while preserving economic growth. However, his management of the depression was rather politically tone deaf. The depression caught him off guard and thus he didn't respond accordingly. What ultimately did him in was his support for a tariff bill that precipitated a trade war between the industrialized nations; thus he turned a recession into a deep depression.

This one was not all that surprising. Smith was an Irish Catholic for one thing, and the country was financially doing very well in that decade before the big crash. The KKK at that time was very powerful, opposed to not only blacks, but Jews, Catholics and others, and a nativist, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants first impulse was quite powerful, though diminishing,The New Deal and changing makeup of the country killed off a lot of that, and yet would not be quelled until J.F.K. won. Deeply, deeply embedded in the Republican Party, (of course not most of them) but the ones they try to pretend don't exist anymore, in the hard, hard, HARD right, amongst the Bob Jones types, and some blueblood snobs in the North, there are still some people who won't vote for "Roman Popery." Which is not to say that Anti-Catholicism is dead amongst Democrats and others too.

Silent Cal was popular, and Hoover ran promising to largely continue his policies. The real surprise came a few months later.