The November 1932 elections in Germany - incidentally the last free elections that many parts of the country would see until 1990 - were the last in a long series of German elections that took place in that year. Previously, the parties had competed in a Presidential election on March 13 (with a run-off on April 10), Prussian Landtag elections on April 24, and Reichstag elections on July 31.

The Presidential election of March/April saw Hitler go head-to-head (a candidate in his own right for the first time) against Hindenburg, with the Communist Thälmann running on the far left. In April, the Nazis became the largest party in the Prussian legislature. In the July 31 elections, the Nazis reached the peak of their "freely-elected" power in the Reichstag with 230 (of 608 total) seats. In all three of these elections, Hitler and the Nazis earned 36-37 percent of the popular vote - a rather consistent performance. The fractious Reichstag met in September and was immediately and almost unanimously united in support of a vote of no confidence in the government of Chancellor Franz von Papen, who was forced to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections for November.

Nazi performance in the November 1932 election - a disappointment in which the Nazis lost 34 seats and about four percent of the popular vote - was thus back-grounded by a significant amount of electioneering. However the results of the election are interpreted, this certainly had an important influence on the outcome of the voting.

In his book The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans argues that the sheer amount of electoral politicking that occurred in 1932 had exhausted the Nazis, both financially and spiritually. The Party's coffers were drained and therefore unable to maintain the kind of capital-intensive "propaganda offensive" that had brought it success in the past, and it was evident that many Germans had grown tired, or at least wearily accustomed, to these once innovative, energetic methods. Evans argues that certain classes of the Party's natural constituency, such as rural voters and the middle class, were alienated by a quick turn to the left that was executed by the Nazis before the November election. Hitler was portrayed as a "man of the people" in opposition to the pretentious aristocrats of the Papen government (popularly known as the "Cabinet of Barons"). The Nazis emphasized this swing to the left by cooperating with the Communists in a transport workers' strike in Berlin just days before the election. This account is more-or-less corroborated by other historians, like Volker Ullrich in Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 and Michael Burleigh in The Third Reich: A New History. William Sheridan Allen, in The Nazi Seizure of Power, his local history of the growth and triumph of the Nazi Party in the Lower Saxon town of Northeim, pronounces the November 1932 campaign as characterized by "election weariness," as the Nazis ("running scared") deployed left-wing slogans like "Down with the Dictatorship of the Money-bags" and "Our daily bread is the prime need. We want bearable living conditions!" Though the Nazis held a majority in Northeim, they watched their vote drop by a percentage similar to their nationwide slip.