South Carolina gubernatorial election, 1910

The 1910 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 8, 1910 to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease won the Democratic primary and ran unopposed in the general election to become the 90th governor of South Carolina.

Democratic primary

By 1910, the South Carolina Democratic Party had split into two factions: the well-to-do farmers with ties to Clemson College and the tenant farmers who largely did not benefit from many of the proposals instituted by Benjamin Tillman and his followers. Many of these poor farmers escaped the fields to the relative prosperity of a mill town. Coleman Livingston Blease, a lawyer from Newberry, sought to portray himself as the candidate for the downtrodden and oppressed white man who had not benefited from the Tillman era. Blease and prohibitionist candidate Claudius Cyprian Featherstone emerged as the front runners in the Democratic primary on August 30. Featherstone and his conservative allies attacked Blease for his coarse behavior, similar to A.C. Haskell's attacks on Tillman in the gubernatorial election of 1890, but once again the attacks only strengthened the candidacy of the antagonist. On September 13, Blease won by just over 5,000 votes in the runoff to essentially become the next governor of South Carolina because there was no opposition in the general election.

Democratic Primary
Candidate Votes %
Coleman Livingston Blease 33,411 31.7
Claudius Cyprian Featherstone 30,045 28.5
Thomas Gordon McLeod 25,263 24.0
John Gardiner Richards, Jr. 9,770 9.3
F.H. Hyatt 5,436 5.1
John T. Duncan 1,436 1.4
Democratic Primary Runoff
Candidate Votes % ±%
Coleman Livingston Blease 56,250 52.6 +20.9
Claudius Cyprian Featherstone 50,605 47.4 +18.9

General election

The general election was held on November 8, 1910 and Coleman Livingston Blease was elected the next governor of South Carolina without opposition. Being a non-presidential election and few contested races, turnout was much less than the previous gubernatorial election.

South Carolina Gubernatorial Election, 1910
Party Candidate Votes % ±
Democratic Coleman Livingston Blease 30,739 100.0 0.0
Majority 30,739 100.0 0.0
Turnout 30,739
Democratic hold
  65+% won by Blease

See also

References

External links

Preceded by
1908
South Carolina gubernatorial elections Succeeded by
1912
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/12/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.