page_title: Al Smith 1928 presidential campaign
section_title: Outcome
hierarchical_section_title: Al Smith 1928 presidential campaign / Outcome
caption_attribution_description: Al Smith (standing front, center right), smiling, wearing straw hat. In background right unidentified man in top hat, young man in (boyscout?) uniform.
context_page_description: Al Smith, Governor of New York, was a candidate for President of the United States in the 1928 election. His run was notable in that he was the first Catholic nominee of a major party, he opposed Prohibition, and he enjoyed broad appeal among women, who had won the right of suffrage in 1920.
context_section_description: Smith was an articulate proponent of good government and efficiency, as was Hoover. Smith swept the entire Catholic vote, which had been split in 1920 and 1924 between the parties, and attracted millions of Catholics, generally ethnic whites, to the polls for the first time and especially women, who were first allowed to vote in 1920.
  Smith lost important Democratic constituencies in the rural North and in southern cities and suburbs. He, however, succeeded in the Deep South in part because of the appeal of his running mate, Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas, but he lost five southern states to Hoover. Smith carried the ten most populous cities in the United States, an indication of the rising power of the urban areas and their new demographics.
  In addition to the issues noted above, Smith was not a very good campaigner. His campaign theme song, "The Sidewalks of New York", had little appeal for rural folks, and they found his 'city' accent, when heard on the "radio," seemed slightly foreign. Smith narrowly lost New York, whose electors were biased to rural upstate and largely Protestant precincts. While the future Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt managed to win the New York gubernatorial election, Smith nevertheless lost his home state and the presidential election to the Republican candidate Hoover and he became the first Democratic candidate since Reconstruction to lose more than one southern state.
caption: Smith during the campaign
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