List Of 1960 Swing States
The United States presidential election of 1960 was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. The Republican Party nominated incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, while the Democratic Party nominated John F. Kennedy, Senator from Massachusetts. The incumbent President, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, was not eligible for re-election after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Kennedy was elected with a lead of 112,827 votes, or 0.17% of the popular vote, giving him a victory of 303 to 219 in the Electoral College, the closest since 1916. This was the first election in which all fifty of the current United States participated.
A number of factors explain why the election was so close. Kennedy gained since there was an economic recession which hurt the incumbent GOP, and he had the advantage of 17 million more registered Democrats than Republicans. Furthermore, the new votes that Kennedy gained among Catholics almost neutralized the new votes Nixon gained among Protestants. Kennedy's campaigning skills outmatched Nixon's. In the end, Nixon's emphasis on his experience carried little weight, and he wasted energy by campaigning in all 50 states instead of concentrating on the swing states. Kennedy used his large, well-funded campaign organization to win the nomination, secure endorsements, and with the aid of the last of the big-city bosses to get out the vote in the big cities. He relied on running mate Lyndon B. Johnson to hold the South and used television effectively.
This election is notable as being the first time in U.S. history that two sitting U.S. Senators (Kennedy and Johnson) were elected as President and Vice President, which has been repeated once, by Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2008 (in both cases, the president was the younger, more junior senator).
Read more about List Of 1960 Swing States: South
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, swing and/or states:
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)