[1] Americans can deal with honest idiots or corrupt genius but in Harding's case they wouldn't stand for a corrupt fool. Myriad scandals were already undermining him but a health scare was the final nail in the coffin and he announced he would not seek re-election.
[2] Coolidge suffered enough from Harding that McAdoo could get through despite a graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, but the first half of his term suffered the aftermath, religious clashes and a heavily emboldened Klan in the south. The second half faced the Great Depression. McAdoo's aid package, the Square Deal, staunched the bleeding unless you were catholics in an area where the local Deal official felt emboldened or black in the South, leading to severe damage for McAdoo's party (and various buildings in several riots)
[3] It was not so much the performance of the economy, or the nature of the Square Deal, that led to the Democrats defeat in 1932. It was more related to the divisiveness with which the Square Deal distributed itself. In these circumstances it perhaps should not have been surprising that the Republicans would be captured by an insurgent progressive ticket, that gave America the 'New Deal' the tone of which was set even before 1932, when LaGuardia and Norris coordinated from Congress to shepherd pro-labor legislation. But then tragedy struck. The rejuvenated Klan would not take the election of a Papist sitting down...
[4] Losing one Republican president to a failed actor at a theatre was a mistake. To lose two? It wasn't even as if Fiorello La Guardia was a great supporter of African-Americans. The New Deal was more evenly applied across the South than the Square Deal had been, of course, but that did not a enfranchisement program make. However, it was actually due to the repeated insults in the foreign and liberal press about the new government's disinterest in civil rights that prompted the idea of a big, showy gesture. The President would go to the premiere of the new Gershwin show on Broadway!
Alas, the young, vicious and out of work chorus boy Marion Morrison also bought a ticket- and a knife.
'Porgy and Bess' was not performed in New York again until 1975.
George Norris, for his part, used the murder as a chance to expand the New Deal across the country. 'All of us at the table, or none of us,' as he said. The final year of what Norris insisted on calling the 'La Guardia' presidency put in place the Federal Anti Lynching Law- but by November 1936, it was clear that this election would be fought about the very basis of future American society.