What impelled the US to fight Spain was not a war-crazed public infected with yellow journalism, as most historians have for conventional wisdom, but the collusion of an ambitious political party pair seeking to again make the US a country "safe for oligarchy." That was their response to the Populist movement of the 1890s, a destabilising threat to the "Republican–Democrat" two-party system. Moreover, despite the US defeating Imperial Spain, within the Republican Party, the Populist movement soon yielded to a Progressive movement led by Senator Robert La Follette, which culminated in the presidential election of 1912 in which more than 70 per cent of the votes were against the incumbent US president, William Howard Taft (1909–1913), who came third: "The privileged interests... seemed about to receive their death blow. Government of, by, and for the people was about to be restored to the American Republic."