Following the Panic of 1893 and the Populist movement, Michigan would turn from a competitive Republican-leaning state into a rigidly one-party polity dominated by the Republican Party.

[4] A brief turn of the strongly evangelical Cabinet Counties toward the Populist movement in the 1896 presidential election would reverse itself following the return to prosperity under President William McKinley, so that these joined in Republican hegemony until the Great Depression.

[7] However, during 1911 state Governor Chase Osborn became one of the first politicians to work for a return of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House,[8] and would soon call for both incumbent President Taft and rival progressive Robert M. La Follette to withdraw for Roosevelt to gain the nomination outright.

[10] The state’s few Democratic delegates backed eventual nominee, Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson of Virginia.

[14] However, Michigan was actually comfortably won by Roosevelt and running mate governor of California Hiram Johnson, with 38.95 percent of the popular vote, against the incumbent president William Howard Taft (R–Ohio), and running mate Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, with 27.63 percent of the popular vote.