in spite of the fact that the newspapers in question favored Smith, gave large majorities to Hoover, in the case of the Times by over two-to-one. Despite these polls, Smith campaigners took a long time to realize the danger that he would not carry the traditional "Solid South". Vote After a heated campaign in which he had played little part, Herbert Hoover won Florida against Al Smith by 42,404 votes or by a margin of 16.71 percentage points. Vis-à-vis the 1924 election, swings of up to 100 percentage points occurred in the western Panhandle pineywoods, where opposition to Smith's Catholic religion reached the fanatical, and Hoover also gained from increased Republican voting by northern migrants in Miami, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Sarasota and Jacksonville, along with the growth of an urban middle class in those cities. The 1928 US presidential election would be the first time that Florida would become a crucial bellwether state in presidential elections: from 1928 and on, the winner of the presidential election has carried the state in every election except in 1960, in 1992, and in 2020. In contrast, the counties of the central and eastern Panhandle remained loyal to Smith, who still carried ten counties in this region, all over thirty-five percent nonvoting African-American, by three-to-one or larger majorities, because they saw party regularity as essential to preserving white supremacy against the Negro. However, unlike Alabama and Georgia, Florida lacked the strength to counter anti-Catholic voting – which was indeed stronger than in most other parts of the white South – with the result that Hoover gained his largest margin among the five Confederate states he carried. Results Results by county Notes References Florida 1928 Florida elections 1928