favor more far-reaching reforms, including federal regulation of banks and securities, protections for union organizers and federal spending on highway construction and education. Bryan also briefly expressed support for the state and federal ownership of railroads in a manner similar to Germany but backed down from that policy in the face of an intra-party backlash. Presidential election of 1908 Roosevelt, who enjoyed wide popularity among most voters even while he alienated some corporate leaders, anointed Secretary of War William Howard Taft as his successor. Meanwhile, Bryan re-established his control over the Democratic Party and won the endorsement of numerous local and state organizations. Conservative Democrats again sought to prevent Bryan's nomination, but were unable to unite around an alternative candidate. Bryan was nominated for president on the first ballot of the 1908 Democratic National Convention. He was joined by John W. Kern, a senator from the swing state of Indiana. Bryan campaigned on a party platform that reflected his long-held beliefs, but the Republican platform also advocated for progressive policies, which left relatively few major differences between the two major parties. One issue that the two parties differed on concerned deposit insurance, as Bryan favored requiring national banks to provide deposit insurance. Bryan largely unified the leaders of his own party and his pro-labor policies won him the first presidential endorsement ever issued by the American Federation of Labor. As in previous campaigns, Bryan embarked on a public speaking tour to boost his candidacy but was later joined on the trail by Taft. Defying Bryan's confidence in his own victory, Taft decisively won the 1908 presidential election. Bryan won just a handful of states outside of the Solid South, as he failed to galvanize the support of urban laborers. Bryan remains the only individual since the Civil War to lose three separate U.S. presidential elections as a major party nominee. Since the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, Bryan and Henry Clay are the lone individuals who received electoral votes in three separate presidential elections but lost all three elections. The 493 cumulative electoral votes cast for Bryan across three separate elections are the most received by a presidential candidate who was never elected. Bryan remained an influential figure in Democratic politics, and after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in the 1910 midterm elections, he appeared in the House of Representatives to argue for tariff reduction. In 1909,