History will never know in round numbers how many women voted against the President and his party at this crisis, for there are no records kept for men and women separately, except in one state, in Illinois. The women there voted two to one against Mr. Wilson and for Mr. Hughes.
Men outnumber women throughout the entire western territory; in some states, two and three to one; in Nevada, still higher. But, whereas, in the election of 191, President Wilson got 69 electoral votes from the suffrage states, in the 1916 election, when the whole West was aflame for him because of his peace policy, he got only 57. Enthusiasm for Mr. Hughes in the West was not sufficiently marked to account entirely for the loss of these 12 electoral votes. Our claim that Democratic opposition to suffrage had cost many of them was never seriously denied.
The Democratic Judiciary Committee of the House which had refused to report suffrage to the House for a vote, had only one Democratic member from a suffrage state, Mr. Taggart of Kansas, standing for reelection. This was the only spot where women could strike out against the action of this committee—and Mr. Taggart. They struck with success. He was defeated almost wholly by the women’s votes.
With a modest campaign fund of slightly over fifty thousand dollars, raised almost entirely in small sums, the women had forced the campaign committee of the Democratic Party to assume the defensive and to practically double expenditure and work on this issue. As much literature was used on suffrage as on peace in the suffrage states.
Many Democrats although hostile to our campaign said without qualification that the Woman’s Party protest was the only factor in the campaign which stemmed the western tide toward Wilson, and which finally made California the pivotal state and left his election in doubt for a week.
Again, with more force, national suffrage had been injected into a campaign where it was not wanted, where the leaders had hoped the single issue of “peace” would hold the center of the stage. Again many women had stood together on this issue and put woman suffrage first. And the actual reelection of President Wilson had its point of advantage, too, for it enabled us to continue the education of a man in power who had already had four years of lively training on the woman question.