1960 United States presidential election
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. Democratic United States Senator John F. Kennedy defeated incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee. Kennedy won a 303 to 219 Electoral College victory and is generally considered to have won the national popular vote by 112,827, a margin of 0.17 percent. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas and was succeeded by Johnson.
About 1960 United States presidential election in brief
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. Democratic United States Senator John F. Kennedy defeated incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee. Kennedy won a 303 to 219 Electoral College victory and is generally considered to have won the national popular vote by 112,827, a margin of 0.17 percent. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas and was succeeded by Johnson. Nixon would later successfully seek the presidency in 1968 and win reelection in 1972, but would resign in August 1974 due to the Watergate scandal. The issue of the Cold War dominated the election, as tensions were high between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was the first election in which fifty states participated and the last in which the District of Columbia did not. Until 2020, this was also the last election where Ohio voted for the losing candidate. Kennedy’s Roman Catholic issue was an issue in the primaries, and Hubert Humphrey decided to continue the contest in almost entirely Catholic areas. The first televised debate of 1960 was held in West Virginia, and Kennedy outperformed Humphrey’s campaign and outperformed him. Kennedy was initially dogged by suggestions from some Democratic Party elders that he was too youthful and inexperienced to be president; these critics suggested that he should agree to be the running mate for another Democrat. The 1960 presidential election is the closest election since 1916, and this closeness can be explained by a number of factors.
Kennedy benefited from the economic recession of 1957–58, which hurt the standing of the incumbent Republican Party, and he had the advantage of 17 million more registered Democrats than Republicans. The new votes that Kennedy gained among Catholics almost neutralized the new votes Nixon gained among Protestants. Kennedy relied on Johnson to hold the South, and used television effectively, but despite this, Kennedy’s popular vote margin was the narrowest in the 20th century. Fourteen unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama cast their vote for Senator Harry F. Byrd, as did a faithless elector from Oklahoma. The Democratic National Convention chose Kennedy as a compromise candidate acceptable to all factions of the party. This reduced their potential delegate count going into the Democratic presidential nomination, but it allowed the convention’s delegates to choose him as a \”compromise candidate acceptable to all factions of the party. The final delegate count was 1,856, which was less than half the number of delegates that would have been needed for Kennedy to win the nomination. The winner of the presidential election in 1960 was incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would go on to win a second term in office in 1968. The next election was in 1968, and Eisenhower would be succeeded by his Vice President, Gerald Ford. The last election to be held in which an incumbent president was ineligible to run for a third term because of the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment was in 1964. The election was also the first in which a candidate could not run for reelection.
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This page is based on the article 1960 United States presidential election published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 26, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
