Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The 1960 Presidential Election Popular Vote

Episode Date: July 19, 2020

There have been 5 acknowledged presidential elections in US history where the winner of the popular vote did not win in the electoral college. However, there is a very good argument to be made that there is a sixth election that should be added to that list. The conventional wisdom holds that John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 popular vote by 112,827 votes. However, to get to this number, you have to put a tortured spin on the numbers from one state in particular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There have been five acknowledged presidential elections in U.S. history where the winner of the popular vote did not win in the Electoral College. However, there's a very good argument to be made that there is a sixth election that should be added to that list. The conventional wisdom holds that John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 popular vote by 112,827 votes. However, to get to this number, you have to put a tortured spin on the numbers from one state in particular. Learn more about the numbers behind the 1960 presidential election. on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by G Adventures. These are very troubled times. Even though things are starting to get better and more countries are opening up, people are still hesitant to travel, and that is totally understandable. That is why Gadventures has announced its new Travel with Confidence Plus collection.

The Travel with Confidence Plus collection are 37 tours in 27 countries that have increased safety and sanitation protocols to protect you and other travelers. These tours will have smaller group sizes, private transportation, and cheaper options to get your own room, as well as more personal space. G-Adventures has also earned the World Travel and Tourism Council's Safe Travel Stap for their health and hygiene protocols and has implemented the Adventure Travel Trade Association's COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines. The Travel with Confidence tours are available for booking today and will be departing from October 2, 2020 to the end of 2021. For more information and to book your tour, click on the link in the show notes. First, let me start this episode out by noting that none of the things I'm going to discuss in this episode would have changed the outcome of the.

the 1960 election. The United States selects its presidents via the Electoral College, and nothing I'm going to talk about would have changed the vote in the Electoral College in 1960. Also, I'm not going to talk about alleged election fraud where dead people voted in Chicago or there was ballot stuffing in Texas. That may or may not have happened, but that is beyond the scope of this episode. I'm also going to be citing a lot of numbers, and just to make it easier to listen and follow along, I'm going to be rounding to the near 1,000. It doesn't change the general conclusion, but it will make it easier to understand. If you want to dig into the numbers, they're all publicly available, and you can do it yourself. That being said, first, a quick history of winning the popular vote

and losing in the Electoral College. This has happened five times, which everyone can agree upon. 1824. John Quincy Adams beat Andrew Jackson. Technically, this wasn't one in the Electoral College, it was one in the House of Representatives. Because no one won a majority in the Electoral College, the election was passed down to the House where they decided. This is the only election in U.S. history where that has ever happened, and it was incredibly messed up. And it's definitely something there is going to be an episode about in the future. 1876. Rutherford B. Hayes, who you remember is a really big deal in Paraguay, defeated Samuel Tilden. This is the only time the losing candidate actually received the majority of the popular vote, not just a plurality.

1888. Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland. If you ever wonder why Grover Cleveland has a distinction of serving two non-consecutive terms as president, this election is why. 2000. George Bush defeated Al Gore. I'm sure this is recent enough that I don't need to remind anyone about it. And 2016, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, and I'm really sure no one needs a refresher on this election. So if you accept this history, then five of the 58 presidential elections which have taken place had the person who got the most popular.

votes lose in the Electoral College. So why should the 1960 election be added to this list? The narrative you will find in most history books was that Kennedy received 34,220,984 votes for 49.72% of the popular vote. Richard Nixon received 34,108,157 votes for 49.55% of the popular vote. Kennedy edged out Nixon by 112,827 votes, or 0.12% winning one of the closest elections in history. The problem with this was the election in Alabama. To get the numbers I just listed, you have to do funny math to the vote totals in Alabama. In most states, people voted for a candidate, then a slate of electors from that party would attend the electoral college and vote for that candidate. In almost every state, the link between votes and in election.

electors is pretty straightforward. In Alabama, in 1960, however, they didn't do it that way. Why was Alabama different? As you can probably guess, it had to do with segregation in civil rights. At the 1948 Democratic Convention, the party added a plank to their platform about civil rights, and that caused a walkout at the convention of southern states, and a brief attempt at a third party in 1948. As a third party, they really had no chance of winning anything, and the party never ran for any local or state offices. They returned to the Democratic Party and remained a faction there for the next decade. Their strategy through the 50s and into the 1960 election was to serve up a slate of unpledged delegates who would in reality be Democrats but would be able to swing the election if

were close to get concessions from whoever they put their support behind. In 1960, three states put up a slate of unplaged electors for people to vote on. While unplaged on paper, everyone knew that they were pro-segregation Southern Democrats who would vote for Senator Harry F. Bird from Virginia if the Electoral College wasn't close. In Louisiana and Mississippi, the unpledged delegates were a totally different slate from the Democrat and Republican delegates, so assigning votes to delegates was pretty easy. People voted for the slate of delegates as a single package, so attributing votes was simple. In Mississippi, the unplged delegates actually got the most votes, and Mississippi's eight electoral votes went to Senator Byrd.

In Louisiana, the unplaged delegates came in third, and Kennedy won. Alabama is where the problem lies. In Alabama, you didn't vote for a slate of electors. You had to vote for electors individually. Alabama had 11 electoral votes in 1960. The Republicans offered up 11 electors, and the Democrats offered up 11 of their own. Every voter had 11 votes, which they could split between the 22 electors on the ballot. They could split their votes between Republicans and Democrats, or they didn't have to vote for all,

11 if they didn't want to. All of the Republican electors were pledged to Nixon. The Democrats, however, were a mess, and this is where the problem lies. In the 1960, Alabama Democratic primary, 24 electors ran as unpledged electors, and 11 ran as loyalists who would vote for Kennedy. All things being equal, the segregationists were their larger group in Alabama at the time. But because they had 24 electors running, and the loyalists had 11, the unpledged pro-segregationist electorate, split their vote. After an extremely close runoff and recount, the Democrats ended up with a slate of 11 electors, which included six-unpledged electors and five loyalist electors who would vote for Kennedy. In the general election, the electors with the most votes were all Democrats. However,

the sixth-unpled electors received more votes than the five electors pledged to Kennedy. Most sources cite Kennedy as having received 318,000 votes in Alabama, which is the highest vote tally which any of the loyal Kennedy electors received, and with him getting 56.4% of the vote in Alabama and getting credited with all the Democrat votes. The problem is the top unpledged delegate received 324,000 votes, which is more than what Kennedy is credited with. If someone were to be credited with all the votes on the Democratic side, it should be Senator Bird, not John Kennedy. This creates one of two paradoxical results, which is how it is listed in most sources. First, the person whose electors got the most popular votes, Harry Bird, is credited

with zero popular votes. Or alternatively, as it's listed in Wikipedia, you have three candidates getting a combined 156% of the popular vote. Neither result makes any sense. The top vote getter shouldn't be credited with zero votes, and the combined vote shouldn't add up to over 150%. If Alabama had a separate slate of electors like Mississippi did, Kennedy probably wouldn't have gotten any electoral votes from Alabama, as the vote for the individual Alabama electors indicates. Either the segregationist delegates would have won, like in Mississippi, or the Democrats would have split the vote and Nixon would have won. So how do you resolve this? The simplest solution would be to credit the popular vote proportionally to the two Democrats.

Average the vote totals of the 11 Democrat electors, and then award 6.11th of them to Harry Bird, and 5.11th of them to Kennedy. 5.11 is approximately 45%, which is very similar to the combined Democrat vote that Kennedy received in Mississippi, which was 48%. So this is a pretty reasonable assumption. Using this method, Kennedy's adjusted vote total in Alabama would be 146,000, which is a difference of 173,000 less than what he is usually given credit for. If you remember from the introduction of the episode, the margin of victory in the national election that Kennedy is usually given is 112,000. That means if you adjust the Alabama popular vote to reflect the way the electors

actually voted and popular preference, Nixon won the national popular vote by about 60,000 votes. This was the actual result that many national news sources such as the New York Times reported immediately after the 1960 election. As I mentioned before, all of this changes nothing. Alabama's electoral votes would remain the same and Kennedy still clobbered Nixon 303 to 219 in the Electoral College. It does, however, mean that the closest election in history was even closer than we thought, and there should be a sixth election in the list of times when the popular vote winner didn't win the Electoral College. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Please remember to leave a

review over on Apple Podcasts. Even a simple review can really help the show get discovered in the sea of other podcasts that are out there.