Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the five West Tennessee Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne[1] voted Republican – generally by landslide margins – as they saw the Democratic Party as the “war party” who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight.

[2] On the other hand, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee, which had supported and driven the state’s secession, was equally fiercely Democratic because it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction.

[3] After the disenfranchisement of the state’s African-American population by a poll tax was largely complete by the 1890s,[4] the Democratic Party was certain of winning statewide elections if united,[5] although, unlike the Deep South Republicans, the Democratic Party would almost always gain thirty to forty percent of the statewide vote from mountain and Highland Rim support.

During the period before the 1920 presidential election, Tennessee was the center of bitter debate over the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which the state, with its Democratic Party still seriously divided,[6] ultimately passed by a very close margin, 50 to 46, in the House of Representatives.

It had had the strongest Republican Party in the region since Reconstruction was overthrown, and some suggested he could make a challenge in North Carolina[12] where the poll tax had just been abolished by a state constitutional amendment in 1919.