Could McKinley have broken the Solid South (at least somewhat)

Could McKinley have broken the Solid South, at least to an extent?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Partially

    Votes: 6 66.7%
  • No

    Votes: 3 33.3%

  • Total voters
    9
In the South, there were numerous Republican counties, notably in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia. Even in Georgia, a state in the Deep South, there were counties returning Republican majorities. This was the result of an attempt by Republican politicians to heal sectional resentment and make the South competitive.

While traveling the South in 1895, McKinley realized that many conservative Southern whites were angry at the populist radicals who controlled the Democratic Party in their states. White businessmen of Georgia wanted the support of a party that would oppose regulation and taxation as long as it would allow them to preserve white supremacy. The possibility of preserving white supremacy without offending loyal black Republicans seemed like a possibility after black leader Booker T. Washington gave a speech in 1895 that proposed the "Atlanta Compromise", which held that whites should support blacks in their struggle for economic independence as they learned trade and industry, and in return blacks would not challenge the political or social order of Jim Crow. The policy was somewhat of a success because McKinley won 37% of Georgia's vote (the closest a Republican would come to winning the state until 1928).
Noticed this while reading about William Jennings Bryan on Wikipedia, and it inspired me. Is it in any way possible, in your opinion, for William McKinley to have decided to put some significant focus on winning votes in the South in order to open up a Republican voter base in the region, by getting the Redeemers to at least partially abandon the Democratic Party to Bryan and support McKinley instead?
 
There were attempts by the Republicans in the 1880's and early 1890's to pass laws to ensure federal oversight of elections. It would have increased McKinley's chances of cracking the Solid South if that would have been successful. As it was he won over 46% of the popular vote in both North Carolina and Tennessee in 1896.
George Henry White, a Republican and a Black man, was elected to the US House of Representatives from North Carolina in 1896 and 1898. Actually, there was only one member of the Democratic Party among the nine US Representatives from North Carolina in the fifty-fifth Congress. Tennessee had couple of Republicans in the same Congress.
In a long winded way, I suppose that I am saying that it would not be totally unreasonable having McKinley win at least some border states. A former Yankee officer winning in the deep south maybe not so much.
 
McKinley did very narrowly carry KY (or 12 of its 13 electoral votes) in 1896. So far as the actual ex-Confederacy [1] is concerned, though, his closest state was TN, and it was not really all that close: -5.76 He also lost by less than 7 percent in NC (-5.82) and VA (-6.56). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_United_States_presidential_election These were certainly much closer figures than 1892; Bryan's "radicalism" did evidently scare some Upper South Democrats. Still, the figures were not all that unprecedented; in 1888, for example, Cleveland almost lost VA and won NC by only 4.59 percent and TN by 6.49. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1888_United_States_presidential_election In short, there was a substantial Republican minority in the Upper South, but in 1896 it is hard for me to see it reaching actual majority status in any ex-Confederate state. (In NC, for a while a Republican-Populist alliance did win state elections https://www.ncpedia.org/fusion-republicans-and-populists but it was ultimately defeated by the Democrats' "white supremacy" campaign, and in any event Populists obviously could not support McKinley.)

By 1900, the increasing disfranchisement of African Americans and the fact that some Democrats who opposed Bryan in 1896 on free silver were willing to support him in 1900 on anti-imperialism put the South even farther out of reach: McKinley lost TN by 8.08 points, NC by 8.46, and VA by 11.47. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_United_States_presidential_election By 1904, TR despite his national landslide (and his victory in MO and near-victory in KY) was losing TN by over 10 points, and NC and VA by over 20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_United_States_presidential_election

[1] The Confederacy did of course claim MO and KY but these are generally considered border rather than southern sates.
 
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