1956 United States presidential election in Tennessee

For over a century after the Civil War, Tennessee was divided according to political loyalties established in that war. Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the five Western Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin, and Wayne[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] After the disfranchisement of the state's African-American population by a poll tax was largely complete in the 1890s,[7] the Democratic Party was certain of winning statewide elections if united,[8] although unlike the Deep South Republicans would almost always gain thirty to forty percent of the statewide vote from mountain and Highland Rim support.

Between 1896 and 1948, the Republicans would win statewide contests three times but only in the second amiss the national anti-Wilson tide of 1920[9] did they receive down-ballot coattails by winning three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP First and Second Districts.[10] After the beginning of the Great Depression, however, 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.[11] State GOP leader B. Carroll Reece is widely believed to have had agreements with E. H. Crump and later Frank G. Clement and Buford Ellington that Republicans would not contest offices statewide or outside their traditional pro-Union areas.[12] The Crump machine would abruptly fall in 1948 after its leader supported Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond but his own subordinates dissented knowing that a Democratic split would hand the state to the Republicans:[13] even Crump’s long-time ally Senator Kenneth D. McKellar broke with him,[14] and a Middle Tennessee liberal, Estes Kefauver, won Tennessee's other Senate seat in 1948. In 1949, after a failed effort six years before,[15] Tennessee would substantially modify its poll tax and entirely abolish it two years later,[15] largely due to the fact that the Crump machine had “block bought” voters’ poll taxes.[16]

Only eight years later, Kefauver would be on the ballot in Tennessee as the Democrats' candidate for Vice President in this election.

In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower, aided by acquisition of 1948 Dixiecrat votes in West Tennessee cotton counties,[22] would carry the state for the Republicans by an 0.27 percent margin. Unlike in 1952, neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson visited the state.[17] For the 1956 presidential election, Senator Kefauver would seek the presidential nomination but was ultimately chosen by second-time Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson II as his running mate. Despite some campaigners writing the state off for the GOP,[23] Tennessee was won by Eisenhower with 49.21 percent of the popular vote, against Stevenson’s 48.60 percent. This was a slight increase upon Eisenhower’s 1952 margin, due entirely to large gains from 1952 amongst the substantial black electorate of Memphis. Eisenhower was consequently the first Republican to carry Shelby County since James G. Blaine in 1884.[24]

As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last occasion when Tennessee voted to the left of Massachusetts (by margin of victory). This was the first time that a Republican carried Tennessee twice.