1960 United States presidential election
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. In a closely contested election, Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy defeated the incumbent Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. This was the first election in which 50 states participated, marking the first participation of Alaska and Hawaii, and the last in which the District of Columbia did not. This made it the only presidential election where the threshold for victory was 269 electoral votes. It was also the first election in which an incumbent president—in this case, Dwight D. Eisenhower—was ineligible to run for a third term because of the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment.
537 members of the Electoral College
269 electoral votes needed to win
This was the most recent election in which three of the four major party nominees for president and vice president were eventually elected president. Kennedy won the election, but was assassinated in 1963 and succeeded by Johnson, who won the election in 1964. Then, Nixon won the 1968 election. Only Republican vice-presidential nominee Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. failed to succeed to the presidency. As such, this was also the most recent election in which the defeated presidential nominee would later win the presidency.
The election saw the first time that a candidate won the presidency while carrying fewer states than the other candidate, something that would not occur again until 1976. When Kennedy was elected, he became the youngest president elected to the presidency at 43 years, while Theodore Roosevelt was still the youngest president inaugurated to the presidency at 42 years and 10 months in September 1901 following the death of president William McKinley. No matter which candidate won, America would elect its first president born in the 20th century (Kennedy was born in 1917, Nixon in 1913). Nixon faced little opposition in the Republican race to succeed popular incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy, a junior senator from Massachusetts, established himself as the Democratic front-runner with his strong performance in the 1960 Democratic primaries, including key victories in Wisconsin and West Virginia over Senator Hubert Humphrey. He defeated Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson on the first presidential ballot of the 1960 Democratic National Convention, and asked Johnson to serve as his running mate. The issue of the Cold War dominated the election, as tensions were high between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Kennedy won 303 to 219 in the Electoral College, and he won the reported national popular vote by 112,827, a margin of 0.17 percent. Fourteen unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama cast their vote for Senator Harry F. Byrd, as did a faithless elector from Oklahoma. The 1960 presidential election was the closest election since 1916, and this closeness can be explained by a number of factors.[3] Kennedy benefited from the economic recession of 1957–1958, which hurt the standing of the incumbent Republican Party, and he had the advantage of 17 million more registered Democrats than Republicans.[4] Furthermore, the new votes that Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, gained among Catholics almost neutralized the new votes Nixon gained among Protestants.[5] Nixon's advantages came from Eisenhower's popularity, and the economic prosperity of the past eight years. Kennedy strategically focused on campaigning in populous swing states, while Nixon exhausted time and resources campaigning in all fifty states. Kennedy emphasized his youth, while Nixon focused heavily on his experience. Kennedy relied on Johnson to hold the South, and used television effectively. Despite this, Kennedy's popular vote margin was the second narrowest in presidential history, only surpassed by the 0.11% margin of the election of 1880 and the smallest ever for a Democrat (notwithstanding the presidential elections where the winners lost the popular vote).
Results by county, shaded according to winning candidate's percentage of the vote
