[2] The concept of a primary election in which any registered party member would vote for a candidate, was relatively new in the American political landscape and been introduced for presidential delegates in 1912.

In only 12 states were actual primaries held, and even in them, the results were not universally binding for the delegates to the Democratic National Convention, where the presidential candidate would be formally chosen.

Not the least perplexing part of the deal involved a million dollar bonus for McAdoo if the Mexican government reached a satisfactory agreement with Washington on oil lands Doheny held south of the Texas border.

It was also charged that on matters of interest to his client, Republic Iron and Steel, from which he received $150,000 ($2,918,363 in 2022 dollars), McAdoo neglected the regular channels dictated by propriety and consulted directly with his own appointees in the capital to obtain a fat refund.

Senator Thomas Walsh, who earlier had called McAdoo the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton, informed him with customary curtness: "You are no longer available as a candidate."

Friends insisted that McAdoo's silence on the matter hid a distaste that the political facts of life kept him from expressing, especially after the Doheny scandal when he desperately needed support.

However, McAdoo could not command the support of unsatisfied liberal spokesmen for The Nation and The New Republic, which favored the candidacy of the Republican Senator Robert LaFollette.

He won easily against minor candidates, whose success might have denied him key delegations in the South and the West, but Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama was no match for McAdoo.

In doing so, they undoubtedly retrieved lost ground for McAdoo and broadened his previously shrinking base of support, drawing to him rural, Klan, and dry elements awakened by the invigorated candidacy of Smith.

Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee wrote to his sister Nellie: "I see McAdoo carried Georgia by such an overwhelming majority that it is likely to reinstate him in the running."

City immigrants and McAdoo progressives had earlier joined to fight the Mellon tax plans in Congress since both groups represented people of small means.

Frank Walsh, a progressive New York lawyer, wrote, "If his [Smith's] religion is a bar, of course it is all right with me to bust up the Democratic party on such an issue."

The new strength of the party, those elections seemed to indicate, lay not in the traditionalist countryside of Bryan and McAdoo but in the tenement areas of the city and the regions of rapid industrialization.

Also, as Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Josephus Daniels, Smith's followers came from states with big electoral votes that then often swung a presidential election: Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois.