Explanation:
United States presidential election of 1940, American presidential election held on Nov. 5, 1940, in which Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Wendell L. Willkie. By becoming the first president to win a third term, Roosevelt broke the two-term precedent established by the country’s first president, George Washington.
The conventions
The Republican Party, which had been defeated in landslide elections to Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, had a number of leading contenders for the nomination early in 1940, including Thomas E. Dewey, a U.S. attorney in New York, Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, and Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio. Vandenberg lost the Wisconsin and Nebraska primaries to Dewey in April and had receded as a favourite by the time the Republicans met in Philadelphia on June 24–28 to select their party standard bearer. Dewey and Taft finished atop the first ballot, but Dewey had failed to secure the 501 delegates necessary to win. Wendell L. Willkie, a lawyer who had been a Roosevelt delegate at the 1932 Democratic convention, emerged as a dark-horse candidate. By the fourth ballot Willkie had taken the lead, and on the sixth ballot, after Michigan shifted its votes to Willkie, he secured the Republican nomination. The convention then nominated Charles McNary, the party’s leader in the U.S. Senate, for the vice presidency. The Republican platform opposed participation in foreign wars, urged a strong national defense, demanded a slash in federal expenditures, and criticized Roosevelt’s concentration of power in the executive branch.
