Eisenhuth lost her re-election bid for Superintendent of Public Instruction to fellow woman candidate Emma Bates.
On November 6, 1894, in North Dakota's general election, Laura J. Eisenhuth was defeated in her bid for re-election as Superintendent of Public Instruction by Republican candidate Emma Bates. Notably, this contest was between two women, illustrating how quickly the office had come to be seen as a legitimate and even expected arena for female candidates in North Dakota politics, even as broader women's suffrage remained unresolved nationally.
Eisenhuth's single term in office, from January 1893 to late 1894/early 1895, was nonetheless historically decisive: she had already secured her place as the first woman elected to and serving in a statewide executive office in the United States, a distinction unaffected by her subsequent electoral loss. The fact that her successor was also a woman further underscored that North Dakota voters had come to accept women as viable and credible candidates for this particular statewide post.
Following her defeat, Eisenhuth's direct involvement in North Dakota politics diminished, though her legacy as a trailblazer endured. The 1894 election result is an important data point for historians studying the early normalization of women in elected office in frontier and Western states, showing that Eisenhuth's win two years earlier was not an anomaly but part of an emerging, if still limited, pattern of female political participation in the region.