an active role in the campaign to this point, went into the canvass, seeking to steer the campaign away from the harshness of Blair's attacks on Radical Reconstruction. Seymour emphasized his idea that change in the South should be accomplished at the state level, without national interference. The Democrats campaigned for immediate restoration of all states, the "regulation of the elective franchise in the states by their citizens", and amnesty for past political offenses, while State civil authority should take precedence over military action. The president and the Supreme Court should be respected rather than attacked, as he claimed the Republicans had done. The Democrats would be careful to reorder national priorities. Results Horatio Seymour polled 2,708,744 votes and Grant 3,013,650. The closeness of the popular vote surprised the political elite at the time. Republican Representative James G. Blaine called the slender popular majority for Grant "a very startling fact." Blaine, an acute judge of popular sentiment, was at a loss to explain the size of the Democratic vote. Ethnic Irish Catholic and other immigrants had been settling in New York for nearly a quarter century. The narrow margins by which Seymour lost several of the northern states like Indiana, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and the effects of new black votes in the South provoked the suspicion that a majority of white men voted for Seymour. Democrats did not fare well in most of the South, where newly freed African Americans voted in large numbers for Grant. Republicans carried every southern state except Georgia and Louisiana, where Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camelia violence and fraud gave Democrats majorities. Along the border, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware went overwhelmingly Democratic, in Kentucky's case influenced by hostility toward the Radical Reconstructionists, which had led to the state's first postwar government being almost entirely composed of former Confederates. No Democratic presidential candidate before or since has attained a higher percentage of the vote in Kentucky or Maryland, where hostility toward black suffrage was very widespread. As for Delaware, only the Democratic tickets of Johnson/Humphrey in 1964 (which was elected with the largest percentage of the popular vote since 1824) and Obama/Biden in 2008 (which had the first Delawarean on a national ticket) carried the state with a larger percentage of the vote. Two border states, Missouri and West Virginia, both under Republican control, gave their electoral votes to Grant. Seymour narrowly