[3] Another issue was the anti-Cox position taken by the Ku Klux Klan because Cox was viewed by the Klan as too lenient towards Catholicism,[4] and Cox's inconsistent stance on newly passed Prohibition – he had been a "wet" but announced he would support Prohibition enforcement in August[4] The West had been the chief presidential battleground ever since the "System of 1896" emerged following that election.

[7] Cox argued that the League could have stopped the Asian conflicts – like the Japanese seizure of Shandong – but his apparent defence of Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area was very unpopular and large numbers of hecklers attacked the Democrat.

[7] By October, it was clear that the Northwest – where Charles Evans Hughes had carried only Oregon in 1916 – was strongly in favor of the Republicans: in Washington Harding led a combined poll of male and female voters 680 to Cox's 256.

[11] Although there were some gains by the Democratic ticket in later polls, with Cox approaching a 1-to-2 ratio to Harding's support at the end of October,[12] a minimum forty thousand vote plurality was predicted by the Washington Post at the same time.

Parley Christensen, the nominee of the recently created Farmer–Labor Party, performed very well in the state and nearly drove Cox into third place, with only 7,052 votes between the two.