By David Stockman
March 29, 2024
donate FacebookTwitterShare When John F. Kennedy chose his running mate in 1960, he was not in the ideological check-the-box business. He was in the race to win, and to do that he needed the 26 electoral votes of Texas and to retain as many of the 101 electoral votes in the rest of the historic “Solid South” as possible.
Needless to say, leading Democrat contenders for the VP nod like Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson or Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman checked the liberal boxes with fying colors. But when it came to the electoral votes of Texas or Alabama, not so much.
As it happened, JFK choose Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson. The latter delivered his home state by hook and/or crook, and also helped JFK salvage much of the Solid South before it disappeared into today’s red state wall in 1968 and afer. Still, Nixon won 43 electoral votes there, while independent Harry Byrd siphoned of another 15 votes in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
That lef JFK with just 43 electoral votes in the Solid South and an overall margin in the Electoral College that was therefore far closer than suggested by his 303 to 219 win over Nixon. In fact, had Texas gone to Nixon and another 9 electoral votes in the Solid South shifed to Nixon or Byrd, JFK would have been deprived of an Electoral College majority (269 votes), thereby likely forcing the election into the US House of Representatives for the frst time since 1824.
Click for Full Text!