Nixon's Secret (84 page)

NOTE

1
.     Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President
(Kindle Locations 2280-2417).

APPENDIX 2

GENERAL ELECTION

1960 Public Polling

APPENDIX 3

GENERAL ELECTION

1968-Public Polling

APPENDIX 4

Did JFK Lose the Popular Vote?

Sean Trende

RealClear Politics

Right now the RCP averages are showing an odd situation. Mitt Romney leads nationally
1
by one point, but trails in the Electoral College by a 294–244.
2
Moreover, electoral vote number 270 (right now, Wisconsin) favors President Obama by a two-point margin.

While I believe that an electoral vote/popular vote disconnect of this magnitude is unlikely, it certainly is possible that we’ll see another split between the two, especially if the popular vote is decided by less than a point. If that happens, Americans will once again receive a civics lesson in how presidents are
really
chosen.

In particular, we’ll be reminded of the four canonical instances where the electoral vote and popular vote went to different candidates: 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000. These are fairly well-known to political junkies.

Far less well-known is that we should probably include a fifth such split: 1960.

Now, just to be clear, the argument that Richard Nixon should be credited with a popular vote win in 1960 doesn’t rest on theories about dead people voting in Chicago or cows voting in Texas. It does rest on a fuller understanding of Southern voting history.

Before going further, credit where credit is due. This analysis isn’t something I discovered on my own. Instead, it derives from a pair of articles published in
PS: Political Science and Politics
. The first, authored by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Brian Gaines, appeared in the March 2001 edition of that journal. The second, by George Mason University professor Gordon Tullock, appeared in the January 2004 edition. Even back in 1960,
Congressional Quarterly
concluded that it was Nixon, not Kennedy, who had won the popular vote, for the reasons that follow.

If you asked your average political aficionado when the South began to leave the Democratic Party, the answer would probably be 1964. In truth, that exit has much deeper roots. A better starting date is 1938, when FDR conducted an unsuccessful purge of conservative Southerners. The Democratic share of the vote in the South steadily declined from that date forward, as the national Democratic Party fully embraced progressivism.

Things famously came to a head in 1948, when the Democratic National Convention (to Harry Truman’s private consternation) adopted a pro–civil rights plank in the party’s platform. The Southern delegation walked out of the convention and formed the Dixiecrat Party.

But—and this is critical—the goal of Dixiecrats was not to win the popular vote or Electoral College outright. They recognized this as impossible at a time when Reconstruction was still a living memory for many voters (in fact, the last Civil War veteran didn’t die until 1956).

Rather, the Dixiecrats hoped to deny either party a majority of the electoral vote. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state is allotted one vote. The eleven states from the Old Confederacy would surely hold the balance of power in such an election and could extract assurances on civil rights from whichever party wanted the victory the most.

It didn’t come close to working (somewhat surprisingly, in retrospect), and there wouldn’t be another major effort by a Southern candidate to split the Electoral College for another twenty years. But Southern states didn’t give up their quest. In 1956, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana offered up “unpledged” slates of electors who would be free to vote for whomever they wished and could make the difference in a close election.

This brings us, finally, to 1960. In that year, the canonical recitation
3
advises us that Sen. John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in an incredibly close popular vote, 34,220,984 to 34,108,157. That’s a difference of only 112,827 votes.

It’s also inaccurate. Three states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—offered unpledged slates of electors. In Louisiana, the unpledged delegates came in third place to Kennedy and Nixon, receiving only 21 percent of the vote. In Mississippi, the unpledged electors won, edging out Kennedy by three percentage points; those electors eventually voted for Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia.

But Alabama did something very, very different. At the time, voters there did not cast ballots for Democratic or Republicans tickets. Instead, they cast eleven votes, one for each elector from the state. Thus, it was possible to cast six votes for Republican electors and five votes for Democratic electors, if one so chose.

Those electors had been selected by the parties in the primary. In the 1960 Alabama Democratic primary, twenty-four electors ran as unpledged, refusing to be bound by the decision of the Democratic convention. They faced off against eleven “loyalist” candidates, who agreed to accept the national candidate. This actually gave the loyalist forces an advantage; there were eleven slots in the Democratic slate, so the odds were greater that the unpledged electors would lose out by having their votes divided too many ways.

But after an election, an extremely close runoff, and a recount, unpledged electors claimed six of the eleven slots for the Democrats, while loyal electors were awarded the remaining five slots.

In the fall, all eleven Democratic electors defeated the Republican electors. As promised, the five loyal electors eventually cast their ballots for Kennedy. As they suggested they would, the unpledged electors joined their Mississippi neighbors in voting for Byrd.

But the popular vote? It was a mess. After all, some people cast as many as eleven votes, and others case as few as one. We can only estimate that about 550,000 people voted overall. The end result is that the six unpledged Democratic electors each received between 320,957 and 324,050 votes, totaling 1,934,826. The five loyal Democratic electors each received between 316,934 and 318,303 votes, totaling 1,587,900. And the eleven Nixon electors each received between 230,951 and 237,981 votes, totaling 2,588,790 votes.

So how do you count this up? The method most frequently used is to award Kennedy 318,303 votes,
5
representing the highest number of votes cast for a Kennedy elector. Nixon is awarded 237,981 votes, representing the highest number of votes received by a Nixon elector. Others award Kennedy 324,050 votes, representing the highest number of votes cast for a Democratic elector.

This first way is certainly defensible—after all, a Kennedy elector
did
receive 318,303 votes in the state, and from a national perspective, it was an election between Kennedy and Nixon.

But was it the
best
way to do this? For starters, we end up with the rather absurd result that Harry Byrd received a majority of the electoral votes from the state, but is credited with zero popular votes.