DBWI Humphey did not ge tthe nomination in 1960?

departue

Gone Fishin'
What if Hubert Humphrey had not beaten Kennedy in the west virgina primary?

note,, this could be answered as if Humphrey won or he had lost/
 
Kennedy's solution to red-baiting seems to have been becoming more hawkish than the Republicans, so I think he might have wound up doing something foolish in response the Cuban Revolution. Hell, if it was bad enough, we might have taken decades to mend fences with Havana.
 
Well, the story is that despite the ton of money the Kennedys dumped into West Virginia, the voters just could not get over their bigotry towards Catholics.

This leads to a circular conjecture. Its commonly assumed that anti-Catholicism would have kept Kennedy from winning against Nixon. But of course if Kennedy had won in West Virginia, animus against Catholics by definition wouldn't have been so bad.

Other than missing a chance at a Catholic president, and Kennedy being relatively hawkish, I don't see much difference in the political positions of the two politicians. So I don't think the two administrations would have been that different. The most significant possible change is that Kennedy might have not put Lyndon Johnson on the ticket.
 
I can't see Kennedy win either. Humphrey was too liberal for the South and Kennedy was too Catholic for the South. I can imagine a similar defeat.
 
I can't see Kennedy win either. Humphrey was too liberal for the South and Kennedy was too Catholic for the South. I can imagine a similar defeat.
It was pretty close actually. Dunno if Kennedy could beat Nixon, but 1960 was the closest race we had since 1876. Nixon was a perfectly good President though; handled foreign relations real well, and was the man who mandated the moon landings that took place for the bicentennial.
 
It was close, sure, but Nixon's running mate (Henry Cabot Lodge) wasn't worth much at all on the campaign trail. He was selected as a possible counterweight to Democrat inroads in New England, and wound up with his liabilities (a nap every afternoon, no matter what) balancing his assets. Even as a kid (I was eight in 1960) I remember a lot of people saying that if anything happened to Nixon, Lodge would be another Coolidge. No idea what that meant at the time; I learned later they figured he'd be a low-energy, not-doing-much president. Thus it came as no surprise that Lodge wasn't on the ticket in '64. Accounts vary but most say it was mutual: Nixon was less than thrilled with Lodge and Lodge was bored. Nixon's choice in '64 of Theodore McKeldin of MD was a strong move: he actually pushed MD into the GOP column for a while (no mean feat) and shored up the GOP in the rest of the middle Atlantic states. I always thought it was a shame he didn't get the nomination instead of Rockefeller in 1968.

For what it might be worth, though, there wasn't a huge amount of difference between Rockefeller and Scoop Jackson in 1968. They had similar approaches to the cold war, civil rights, and the space program for starters. Maybe that's why turnout in the south in particular was so low that year: more than one commentator said the election pretty much came down to a coin flip.
 
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1960 was close. Jack Kennedy could've beaten Nixon so long as he picked a southern VP. With that said, if Kennedy beat Nixon, we'd have a Democratic 1960s with the Republicans (possibly with Nixon himself) winning the White House back In 1968 and keeping it for most or all of the 1970s. Humphrey made a comeback in 1968 and won back the White House for the democrats for the first time in 16 years and with Humphrey getting re elected and Muskie narrowly beating Reagan in 1976, the Democrats managed to keep the GOP out until 1980.
 
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