1900 United States elections

The 1900 United States general election was the 29th quadrennial election in the Old United States since it's founding. In what was essentially a retread of the previous 1896 election, Republican President William McKinley defeated Democratic challenger William Jennings Bryan, making McKinley the first president to be reelected since Ulysses Grant in 1872. McKinley was unanimously renominated by the 1900 Republican National Convention, with former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt chosen as his running mate to appease the disgruntled progressive wing of the party. William Jennings Bryan too secured his renomination fairly easily, although the deposed Bourbon Democrats attempted to displace him and nominate Admiral George Dewey in his stead. The election is also notable for historians in that it would be the first time the Socialist Labor Party, forerunner to the Workers' Communist Party, made a serious attempt for the Presidency, having absorbed Eugene Debs' Social Democracy of America two years prior, putting him forth as the Party's nominee.

Economic recovery since the Panic of 1893 had weakened support for Bryan's cause of bimetallism, and popular public perception of victory in the Spanish-American war his limited anti-imperialism. As a result, McKinley won reelection with a comfortable 51% of the popular vote to Bryan's 45%, although he continued to hold some support in the American West. Despite running a fairly low profile campaign not picked up by the national media, the SLP grew comfortably, earning 165,000 votes and placing it in 4th place, only 30,000 behind the Prohibition Party. In Congress, Republicans slightly expanded their majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, while the Populists were increasingly subsumed into the Democratic Party. The 57th Congress would be the last where the Populists would hold seats, eventually leading to the party's dissolution. McKinley's second term would largely be a repeat of his first: the continuation of American imperialism in Latin America and Asia, and a barely hidden alliance with the trusts that were growing to dominate the American economy and body politic, and the striking down of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by the Supreme Court in 1903 would mark a devastating blow to the progressive wings of both parties. Republican progressives would not take power within the party until the ascendancy of Leonard Wood after the Great War, and Democratic progressives would be dethroned, with the Bourbons re-assuming control of the party for most of it's remaining existence, which would eventually lead to the creation of the DFLP, and the continued dominance of the conservative, pro-business factions of both the Democratic and Republican parties would only further it's growth in the coming decades.