FDR Wins the Governorship by a Whisker

On November 6, 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York, beating Republican Attorney General Albert Ottinger by roughly 26,000 votes out of more than four million cast. Roosevelt had not wanted the job. He was three years into physical therapy at Warm Springs, Georgia, for the paralysis that had struck him in 1921, and it was Al Smith, the state's outgoing governor and that year's Democratic presidential nominee, who spent weeks calling and wiring him before finally talking him into accepting the nomination on October 2. Hours later, the ticket split in half: Smith lost the presidency to Herbert Hoover and even lost his own state by more than a hundred thousand votes, while Roosevelt, the reluctant candidate, scraped into Albany. The governorship gave him the statewide stage and the Depression-era record he would run on for president four years later.