Did the 1916 attacks cost Woodrow Wilson votes?
The four shark-caused deaths of July 1916 shocked the nation. Sharks didn’t hold the place in public consciousness that they do now. Indeed, Michael Capuzzo, author of Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916, notes in his book that many Americans actively believed that sharks weren’t dangerous at all. Capuzzo quotes a 1915 New York Times article titled, “Let Us Do Justice to Sharks,” which concluded, “That sharks can properly be called dangerous, in this part of the world, is apparently untrue.”
The 1916 attacks, while unusually bad and hardly the most serious threat to American lives that year, ended that attitude toward sharks permanently. They also deeply damaged the Jersey Shore tourism industry. Capuzzo notes that some hotels were posting 75 percent vacancy rates — at the beach, in summer.
Fast forward to that November: Woodrow Wilson, who had won a three-way race by a fairly wide margin in 1912, was running for reelection against Supreme Court justice and former New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes. The end result was much closer than four years earlier, with a 3.1 point margin of victory for Wilson, and a narrow electoral college win with five states closer than 1 percentage point.
Notably, Hughes beat Wilson in New Jersey, where the president lived and had served as governor. It wasn’t even close: Hughes clobbered Wilson by nearly 12 points in his home state, even better than Hughes did in his own home state.
Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels in a 2002 paper provided a partial explanation for this result: sharks. Their paper did not purport to explain the whole of the reversal; as they note, some party bosses in Jersey City and Newark had turned against Wilson, which likely hurt his results in those cities. But excluding the machine towns, the paper argues that beach communities affected by the shark attacks saw bigger reductions in support for Wilson than other areas.
“In summary, then, every indication in the New Jersey vote returns is that the horrifying shark attacks during the summer of 1916 reduced Wilson’s vote in the beach communities by about ten percentage points,” they conclude, a “near-earthquake” by American electoral standards.
This matters for reasons beyond sharks. Achen and Bartels’s goal was to make a broader point about elections and political accountability — and about the limits of elections as a tool for providing accountability. A common theory they were challenging, “retrospective voting,” explained representative democracy as a tool by which voters punish or reward incumbents based on whether their lives have improved or not.