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[3] 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.

[4] Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state's secession was equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction.

The 1920 elections saw a significant but not radical change, whereby by moving into a small number of traditionally Democratic areas in Middle Tennessee[8] and expanding turnout due to the Nineteenth Amendment and powerful isolationist sentiment,[9] the Republican Party was able to capture Tennessee's presidential electoral votes and win the governorship and take three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP First and Second Districts.

In 1922 and 1924, with the ebbing of isolationist sympathy and a consequent decline in turnout,[10] the Democratic Party regained Tennessee's governorship and presidential electoral votes; however, in 1928 anti-Catholicism against Democratic nominee Al Smith in this powerfully fundamentalist state[11] meant that Herbert Hoover improved upon Harding’s performance, although he failed to gain the down-ballot coattails of 1920.

[12] On polling day, the campaign managers for Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (D–New York), running with Speaker John Nance Garner were confident that the Democratic Party would carry the state by at least one hundred thousand votes.