Nixon vs. Kennedy 1960: Who was more likely to win?

The straightforward answer to this question might be "of course Nixon, because he was Vice President, led in the polls, etc." But I'd still like to expand on that a little bit.

As we know, Nixon's under-performance in the first debate was critical, and his ill condition was the result of having been in the hospital to treat a knee injury. Plus, as he refused to abandon his pledge to visit all 50 states, his time off the campaign trail messed up his schedule and likely cost him a few crucial states.

What I'm wondering is this: is Nixon's knee injury such a fluke event that, in most timelines where he and JFK were the nominees, Nixon would have won (even if just slightly)? Or was Nixon bound to screw up the campaign for himself, leading Kennedy to win? Was Johnson the key player in this scenario?
 
Kennedy was likelier to win, given the era, and the general trend in U.S. history to not keep one party continually in the presidency for a long time, with notable exceptions. The last president before George H.W. Bush to be elected president as the incumbent VP was Martin Van Buren.
 
Nixon could have won if he had President Eisenhower hit the campaign trail earlier, Eisenhower wanted to start to campaign for Nixon earlier in order to defend his record against the attacks by Kennedy and the Democrats but Nixon like Gore fourty years later wanted to win on his own and not on the coattails of the President.
Nixon if he uses professional television lighting experts to light him in the first debate like Kennedy did, and used make-up like he was advised to instead of "Lazy Shave".
Nixon used a jet for his campaign and while it could get him across the country faster, the way he was scheduled wasted a lot of time in the air and Kennedy using the prop plane Caroline had to schedule his campaign stops closer together but he was able to get more stops in a day then Nixon.
Kennedy was able to use local free media better than Nixon and was more available to the travelling press corps then Nixon was, and that lead to more favorable coverage for Kennedy.
 
IMO a close race should have been expected from the beginning--and indeed the polls were pretty close all along. There were mistakes and "accidents" damaging both sides. On Nixon's side, the promise to campaign in all fifty states was of course an error (and he probably should have used the knee accident as an excuse to get out of it) but JFK didn't necessarily use his own freedom to decide which states to campaign in to his advantage. If JFK had lost in 1960, we would be asking: What the heck was he doing campaigning in *Oklahoma* on November 3? http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=60384 (Yes, I know Oklahoma was Democratic in most state and local elections in those days. But it had easily gone for Ike in both 1952 and 1956--despite farmers' grumbles about Ezra Taft Benson in the latter year--and was one of the more anti-Catholic states in the Union. It wasn't expected to be close, and it didn't turn out to be close.) Nixon has been ridiculed for spending the last weekend campaigning in *Alaska*--yet in all fairness Alaska *was* close and theoretically could have made the difference in a close race.

One thing that hurt Nixon: Lodge's promise at a Harlem rally that Nixon would appoint an African American to the Cabinet. This endangered Nixon in the South, and when Nixon repudiated the promise it hurt him with African Americans. Nixon's failure to call Mrs. King after her husband's arrest has also been blamed, but again Nixon had to keep the South in mind, and it was likely most African Americans would vote for JFK if only on economic issues anyway.

And then there was Ike's "if you give me a week, I might think of one, I don't remember." https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2010/08/if-you-give-me-a-week-i-might-think-of-one/ Ike said this because the press conference was ending and he was annoyed at the reporter for persisting in questioning him about Nixon's role in his administration. He did not intend to harm Nixon's campaign, but his remarks had that effect.

And there were surprises that hurt JFK, too, like the Puerto Rican bishops declaring that it would be a sin to vote for Governor Luis Muñoz Marin (because of his positions on birth control and other issues). "They said it couldn't happen in America--but it did!" trumpeted Protestant newspapers. JFK worried that if enough voters realized that Puerto Rico was American soil, he was doomed. Fortunately for JFK, "Nobody knows in America/Puerto Rico's in America" in Stephen Sondheim's words.... Seriously, I don't think it's inconceivable that the bishops' statement cost JFK California. (Ironically, it caused a greater stir on the Mainland than in Puerto Rico, where it was recognized as just the latest battle in an old war; and Muñoz Marin easily won re-election.)

Nevertheless, I would say that other things being equal, 1960 should have been a year for the Democrats to win the presidency, though not overwhelmingly. The reasons:

(1) The Republicans had held the White House for eight years. Since 1952, it has been hard for a party that has done so to retain the presidency, 1988 being the only exception (though 1960, 1976, 2000 and 2016 were close).

(2) Eisenhower's victories had largely been personal, not party victories. The Democrats won both houses of Congress in 1954, 1956, 1958 and 1960.

(3) There was a recession, though a mild one, in 1960. Theodore Sorensen has noted that the votes of newly unemployed workers alone in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, and South Carolina were greater than JFK's margins of victory in those states. A better economy would at the least seem to be able to flip IL, MO, and NJ (all of which went for JFK by 0.8% or less), and their 56 electoral votes would have been enough to give Nixon a majority in the Electoral College. No wonder Nixon developed a grudge against William McChesney Martin for not following a more expansionist monetary policy. https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ncy-in-1960-and-keep-it.440309/#post-16768266

If this is the case, why was the race so close? I know some disagree, but I think JFK's religion hurt him more than it helped him. Yes, he did win most Catholic votes, but so did the Baptist Harry Truman in 1948; the Catholic vote for Eisenhower had been basically personal rather than partisan, and I think that any Democrat other than the divorced and dovish Stevenson would have been able to win back the Catholic Democrats who had voted for Ike. (In 1960, most of the issues that would lead Catholics to vote Republican in subsequent elections--abortion, school busing, etc.--did not yet exist.) OTOH, JFK actually did worse against Nixon in 1960 than Stevenson had done against the very popular Ike in the prosperous year 1956 in a number of southern and border states, and it is hard for me to believe that religion was not largely to blame.
 
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Nixon. He was VP to one of the most popular men in US history, and during Ike's second term Nixon developed a distinguished record as a widely respected American statesman. But much like Gore in 2000, Nixon made a series of fatal errors that cost him the presidency. Many of them were actually the same mistakes: poor choice of running mate, disappointing debate performance, not tying himself closely enough with the sitting President, and generally waging an uncharismatic and visionless campaign. Had he not made these mistakes, then Nixon certainly would've won.
 
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