of the legislature with 26 of the 36 seats. Following this defeat, the Home Rule Party would continue to exist in a weakened form until 1912, when it fused with the Hawaii Republican Party. The Democratic Party of Hawaii was reorganized in 1902, but would not become influential until the 1920s when it won multiple Honolulu mayoral elections and elected William Paul Jarrett as delegate to the House of Representatives. However, the Republican party retook the delegation to the House in the 1930s and 1940s, due to support from the Big Five sugar producers. A seminal moment in Hawaiian history, the power of the Big Five was weakened by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which lead to unionization on Hawaii's sugar plantations and ultimately the Democratic Revolution of 1954. In elections that year, the Hawaii Republican Party lost control of the territorial legislature for the first time since 1900, as the Democratic affiliate won nine of the fifteen territorial senate seats and twenty two of the thirty territorial house seats. The Democrats retained control of the legislature in the 1956 elections, while the Republicans retook control of the senate in the 1958 elections. Statehood On May 16, 1959, the affiliate held its first state convention where most of the officer positions went uncontested except for national committeewoman and where the candidates for the upcoming federal and state special elections. In the gubernatorial election incumbent Territorial Governor William F. Quinn narrowly won by 4,139 votes; in the Senate special elections Hiram Fong narrowly won by 9,514 votes while Wilfred Tsukiyama was narrowly defeated by 4,577 votes; and Republicans lost the House election in a landslide. During the 1998 gubernatorial election Maui Mayor Linda Lingle won the Republican nomination and used dissatisfaction with Governor Ben Cayetano's handling of the economy to propel her campaign and was shown to be polling above Cayetano in multiple polls. However, allegations of Lingle being a lesbian and her decision as mayor to require state employees to work on Christmas Eve hurt her. In the general election she was narrowly defeated by 5,254 votes, but she was the most successful Republican nominee for governor since Randolph Crossley in 1966. In 1999 Lingle and many of her supporters took over leadership positions in the party with Lingle herself defeating James Kuroiwa Jr., who was aligned with the party's conservative wing and was pro-life, to become chairwoman