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.

In 1920 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 captured Tennessee's presidential electoral votes and won the governorship and three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP First and Second Districts; however, these gains were temporary because isolationist sympathy ebbed and turnout consequently fell.

[10] Then in 1928 anti-Catholicism against Democratic nominee Al Smith in this powerfully fundamentalist state[11] meant that Herbert Hoover bettered Harding’s performance without however gaining significant down-ballot coattails.

Internal divisions prevented the Republicans taking advantage of a disputed Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1932 between Lewis Pope and Hill McAlister,[12] and for the next third of a century the Republicans would rarely contest statewide offices seriously despite continuing dominance of East Tennessee and half a dozen Unionist counties in the middle and west of the state.