Posted on 12/14/2004 3:28:59 PM PST by swilhelm73
1960: WHO REALLY WON? Just shot an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, on the Electoral College, on which my guests were Tara Ross (whose new book, Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College is wonderfully cogent) and Jack Rakove, a professor of history here at Stanford. When I asked how many times the Electoral College had given chosen as president the candidate who had lost the popular vote, Tara and Jack mentioned the elections that usually get mentioned, namely those of 1876, 1888 and 2000, in which the winners of the popular vote (Tilden, Cleveland and Gore, respectively) lost the electoral vote (to Hayes, Harrison and George W. Bush), and that of 1824, in which it is possible but not certain (because of the way states cast their votes in those days) that Jackson won the popular vote, even though he lost the final electoral vote to John Quincy Adams. Then Jack added the election of 1960, making an assertion that I’d never, ever heard.
In 1960, Jack explained, a number of Southern states, including, for example, Alabama, placed two slates of Democratic electors on the ballot, one slate that was pledged to vote for John Kennedy, and a second that was pledged to vote for Virginia senator Harry Byrd. If you subtract the votes for Byrd from the overall Democratic vote total to derive the number of votes actually cast for John Kennedy, you’ll discover is that the candidate who actually won the 1960 popular vote was…Richard Nixon.
John Kennedy, minority president.
Why do you suppose Michael Moore has never complained about that? Posted at 08:04 PM
RE 1960: WHO ACTUALLY WON? [Peter Robinson] A reader has pointed out a site that provides the actual 1960 vote totals: One of the little appreciated facts about 1960 is that Nixon got more votes than Kennedy. The figures that appear in standard reference works are 34,226,731 for Kennedy and 34,108,157 for Nixon, but the Kennedy total includes 324,050 votes for an unpledged slate of Democratic electors in Alabama, where Kennedy’s name was not on the ballot. His actual vote total was 205,476 less than Nixon’s.
JFK, MINORITY PRESIDENT: YET ANOTHER SOURCE [Peter Robinson] It turns out that just last year John Fund wrote about JFK's 1960 defeat in the popular vote . (With thanks to John for his usual lucidity--and apologies for having missed the article when it first appeared).
"The Associated Press reported that Kennedy's plurality was just 112,827 votes nationwide, a margin of 49.7% to 49.5%. But was Kennedy, like George W. Bush, actually a 'minority president,' elected without a popular-vote plurality?
"It's uncertain because in Alabama, JFK's name didn't actually appear on the ballot. Voters were asked to choose between Nixon and a slate of 'unpledged Democrat electors.' A statewide primary had chosen five Democratic electors who were 'loyalists' pledged to JFK six who were free to vote for anyone.
"The Democratic slate defeated Nixon, 324,050 votes to 237,981. In the end, the six unpledged electors voted for Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia, a leading Dixiecrat, and the other five stuck with their pledge to Kennedy. When the Associated Press at the time counted up the popular vote from all 50 states it listed all the Democratic votes, pledged and unpledged, in the Kennedy column. Over the years other counts have routinely assigned all of Alabama's votes to Kennedy."
"But scholars say that isn't accurate. 'Not all the voters who chose those electors were for Kennedy--anything but,' says historian Albert Southwick. Humphrey Taylor, the current chairman of the polling firm Louis Harris & Associates (which worked for Kennedy in 1960), acknowledges that in Alabama 'much of the popular vote . . . that is credited to Kennedy's line to give him a small plurality nationally' is dubious. 'Richard Nixon seems to have carried the popular vote narrowly, while Kennedy won in the Electoral College,' he concludes." Posted at 10:14 PM
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT WHO REALLY WON IN 1960 [Peter Robinson] Lots of readers of this happy Corner have emailed me on the subject. What have I learned? That we cannot say for certain that in 1960 Richard Nixon, and not John Kennedy, carried the popular vote. What can we say? That, no matter how thoroughly we examine the electoral records, we will never know for certain who did win the 1960 popular vote.
A thorough explanation from Fred Schwarz of American Heritage magazine: In every state but three in 1960, you had a choice between Kennedy and Nixon (sometimes with a few minor-party candidates), and popular votes were counted as usual. In Louisiana and Mississippi, there was a three-way race: Kennedy, Nixon, or "uncommitted." In Louisiana, Kennedy won, and in Mississippi, "uncommitted" won--but in both cases, people could vote for Kennedy (or Nixon) if they wanted, and their votes were recorded as Kennedy (or Nixon) votes. So there was no funny business in either of those states.
The problem occurs in Alabama. There, only two slates of electors were on the ballot (again excluding minor parties): One uncommitted and one for Nixon. "Uncommitted" won by 324,000 to 238,000, and of Alabama's 11 electors, 6 voted for Byrd and 5 for Kennedy. So technically, Rakove [the Stanford history professor] is right--these 324,000 votes are usually counted as Kennedy votes, when in fact they were "uncommitted" votes. And since Kennedy won the election by only 120,000, you can call him a minority president.
Of course, if you want to be super technical, in Alabama and many other states, no one voted for either candidate but rather for electors for that candidate. Yes, this is an exceedingly minor quibble, and if the 11 Alabama electors had cast their votes for Kennedy, no one would object to counting the popular votes as Kennedy votes too. If only one elector had defected, as happened in Oklahoma, they would still have been counted as Kennedy votes. But since 6 of the Alabama electors voted for Byrd [the Virginia Dixiecrat], the question arises as to who should get credit for the 324,000 popular votes.
If you want to boost JFK's total, you call them Kennedy votes and say the 6 electors were faithless, like the Oklahoma guy. If you want to boost Nixon, you say the "uncommitted" votes were for nobody and the Nixon votes were for Nixon. This would leave Nixon with a popular-vote majority of about 200,000….But you can still make a plausible case for counting those votes as Kennedy votes. And if you object that Kennedy's name did not appear on the ballot in Alabama, well, neither did Nixon's. So to be consistent, you would have to take away his 238,000 votes, and Kennedy squeaks ahead again. And a nice summary statement by Professor Matt Franck, chairman of the department of political science at Radford University: Now the margin for Kennedy nationally has long been said to have been about 113,000 votes nationally (the Clerk of the House gave him a margin of 119,000 in April 1961, but the lower figure is accepted today). What we would have to know in order to say that Kennedy actually received fewer votes nationwide than Nixon--and we simply cannot know it--is that at least 113,000 Alabama voters, or more than one-third of those voting Democratic, went to the polls and pulled the lever for the entire slate of eleven Democratic presidential electors while thinking "I want Byrd" (or at least "I don't want Kennedy") rather than "I want Kennedy."
Since Alabama then, as now, used the winner-take-all method of allocating electors to candidates--the party winning the popular-vote plurality having all its electors seated in the college--there was only one way for either Kennedy voters or Byrd voters to get even one electoral vote out of the eleven the state had to cast, and that was to vote for the whole party ticket of electors, whether any presidential candidate's name was on the ballot or not.
We know only that the six Alabama electors who had made no pledge to Kennedy voted for Byrd--probably their intent all along….Is it possible that more than 113,000 Alabama Democratic voters wanted Byrd over Kennedy? Yes. Do we know that for sure? No way….
Posted at 01:33 PM
This story deserves more attention in history. Richard Nixon put loyalty to an America challenged by Communism above his own personal desire to become President. The shameless media conspired with the Democratic Party to cover up a stolen election.
No wonder Democrats long for the godd ole days!
This doesn't even mention the Illinois shenanigans.
This is apart from the well known fact (rarely mentioned in the MSM) that Kennedy and Johnson stole Illinois and Texas by stuffing the ballot boxes. If Nixon had contested the election he probably would have won, but he didn't choose to divide the country.
The margin of victory for Kennedy in Illinois was very narrow. With completely corrupt Richard Daley Sr counting the votes, we will never know.
Nixon did not contest this Illinois vote, some say he should have, but he put country first.
FR is a great place to pick up history that The Obsolete Media will never report.
We seem to have multiple echos on FR today.
Agreed.
Funny thing about this story is that Alabama means nothing to JFK's legitimacy. Voters selected the uncommitted Democrat delegation and the electors voted as they saw fit.
The irregularities in Illinois may have changed the outcome of the vote.
And the map of the world (Cuba, et al).
I know this is pointless but just review history and all that has happened in the last 44 years.
Of course any event happening in a different way than it did can have deep ripples but just think the consequences of what electing the President of the free world has meant and still means today.
Brings into greater perspective memogate,NYT, etc trying to destroy President Bush.
How cool it would have been if we really *had* landed on the moon in '69....
"This story deserves more attention in history. Richard Nixon put loyalty to an America challenged by Communism above his own personal desire to become President. The shameless media conspired with the Democratic Party to cover up a stolen election."
That is right. Richard Nixon, no doubt should have won.
In his book Six Crises there is a good description of the 1960 election, both strategy and aftermath.
=8-]
If you poll those over 55, I'd wager the majority will say that mayor Daley won the election for Kennedy by withholding the Chicago count til last in the country and coming up with enough "extra" votes to ensure the win. I don't know all the evidence for and against that allegation, but I think it's part of our commonly held beliefs about that era.
ping
Minority-first brother Ted what say you? And didn't Caroline prohibit Pres. Bush from invoking her minority-president father's legacy in the last campaign?
Kennedy's margin in South Carolina was very narrow (not quite 10,000 votes) so that could be another case where chicanery determined who got the electoral votes, but South Carolina had only 8 electoral votes so it didn't matter very much.
Because a Dem won????
Though the loss of Washington and about 10 other major cities to the nuclear missiles launched from Cuba during October 1962 which was then followed by an all-out full-scale nuclear exchange between The Soviet Union and the United States would make a bigger impact then just who would have been President don't you think?
There are all kinds of ways of re-writing history if Nixon had won in 1960. Maybe he would have gone ahead with the Bay of Pigs but succeeded, in which case there would have been no Castro to import Russian missiles. He probably would have handled Khrushchev better...would that have meant no Berlin Wall? Would Nixon have handled Vietnam or civil rights better than Kennedy and Johnson did? Would the Sixties have been any less tumultuous?
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