Election Results Maps

I have been working on the manuscript of a biography about Massachusetts state legislator Roland D. Sawyer, a Congregationalist pastor who served as Ware’s state Representative from 1914 to 1940.. This is an election result map showing the results of his last race, the 1942 Democratic primary for the Third Congressional District. He ran as a gadfly candidate to send "an old man” to Congress who would serve a single term without being beholden to anyone. He put up a poor showing; elected officials such as Sen. P. Eugene Casey of Milford and Rep. John S. Derham of Uxbridge were the real contenders. The winner was Philip J. Philbin of Clinton, aide to Sen. David I. Walsh, who went on to serve in Congress until he was famously defeated by another clergyman, Fr. Robert Drinan, in 1970.

The reason Sawyer was at liberty to run a vanity Congressional campaign was because he didn’t seek re-election to his House district in 1940, after redistricting was unkind. Instead, that year he ran for Governor’s Council, possibly to continue his pursuit of the corrupt Councilor from the Boston district. He managed a respectable third-place in the Democratic primary for the Western Mass district.

The other candidates were winner Daniel M. Walsh, Jr. of Springfield, only 31 and eventually a long-serving Hampden County elected official; Frank Long, Springfield soccer mogul and disabled veteran; James R. McQueen, also of Springfield, armament factory worker, scion of Chicopee police family, and secretary of his AFL local; and Ernest W. Brunault, Holyoke alderman.

This is the result from Sawyer’s only successful nomination for higher office: as candidate for Congress in a special election in 1925, to fill a vacancy created by the death of Congressman George B. Churchill. He was defeated by Henry L. Bowles of Springfield.

The map I used is post-reservoir and thus does not include Enfield, which voted for Bowles by 124 to 7.

My newer project is a paper on this election in Vermont’s 1st Congressional District in 1922 (back when Vermont had multiple Congressional Districts!).

This is an interactive map to go along with my Planet Scumm Halloween Election Special! Of Terror! It complements (replaces) the homemade Microsoft Paint map in that article, an old college try. I have fond memories of writing that article, about the political career of supernatural New England nonfiction author Robert Ellis Cahill (whom I read often as a young child) while at my friend’s family lake house in Maine, waiting for him to make the trek. It was the perfect combination of childhood wonder, obscure election research, and vacation.