How the Vote Broke

"All this hogwash about Kennedy cresting too soon, or how miraculous Nixon's surge in the last ten days was--or even what a helluva campaign Nixon ran--frankly pains me," said a prominent Republican in Nixon's home state of California last week. "After the performance he put on during the first two-thirds of the campaign, there was only one way for Nixon to move in the homestretch, and that was up." As politicians of all persuasions sifted the election results last week, most of them agreed on one thing: Dick Nixon came out of the Republican Convention last July clearly in the lead (the Democrats were reeling and disheartened from their own convention, and then proceeded to look worse in the special session of Congress). From the Republican standpoint, the tragedy was that the success of Nixon's last-minute surge all but proved that he could have saved the day with better timing.

Just how narrow the Kennedy victory was could be seen in the arithmetic: including shaky California and Illinois, Kennedy had won 332 electoral votes; Nixon, with razor-close Alaska, had 191; the popular-vote spread was a hairline 279,000. It was so close that Republican National Chairman Thruston Morton called for a recount of the votes in Kennedy-edged Texas, Illinois, Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Some Republicans even dared hope that the recounts might still add up to a Nixon victory (but Nixon disassociated himself from the whole project).

The Coalition. If it were granted that Nixon had not conducted the world's best campaign, this raised another question: Why was Kennedy's victory not bigger? He started with decided Democratic ad vantages. The nation by voter registration is roughly 47% Democratic, 30% Republican. There are Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and in the statehouses. By the numbers, any Democrat had a good chance to be President. Kennedy's television debates made him nationally known, and they helped overcome the feeling that he was too young and too inexperienced. The Republicans' who-can-deal-with-Khrushchev issue somehow got lost in Khrushchev's monkeyshining at the U.N. (It got so that anyone could wag a finger at Khrushchev.) Kennedy had his party's traditional appeal to labor, Jews and Negroes, plus his own appeal to millions of fellow Catholics. More over, there were enough gloomy headlines about business troubles and unemployment to let him make much, in the last weeks, of the Democrats' time-honored claim to be the true defenders of bread and butter.

In the end Kennedy got his squeaked-out victory from a coalition of Northern big-city bosses, labor and urban minorities, plus a big section of the South (thanks largely to Lyndon Johnson). With some 75% of the Catholics and Negroes and 80% or more of the Jews voting for him, he took lopsided majorities in the big cities, and thus in the states they controlled. But none of the major factors working in his favor were decisive enough to give him a sweep. In the Midwest he managed to win only the half-industrial and half-rural states that remained loyal to Franklin Roosevelt's fourth-term election in 1944: Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota and Missouri. In more Republican Ohio and in Wisconsin, Kennedy's New Deal victory formula failed. He lost the farm belt, the Rocky Mountain states and much of the West. The specifics:

Religion. Predictably, Roman Catholics voted in huge numbers for Kennedy, but not in the expected patterns. Essentially, Democratic Catholics who had voted for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 returned to the party and Kennedy. But in the suburbs, in Northern New England and in the farm states, Catholic Republicans stayed Republican. Roughly one Catholic voter out of four voted for Nixon. Nixon carried Ohio partly because Ohio's rural German Catholics, who had been told that Konrad Adenauer was a Nixon man, stayed with him. The anti-Catholic vote helped defeat Kennedy in such border states as Oklahoma, Kentucky and Tennessee. But the surprising Democratic rally in the Deep South proved that rural as well as urban Protestants (mostly Baptists) voted for Kennedy and carried the day.

Minorities. Kennedy's victory with the Negroes was nothing short of triumphant. Always sensitive to recession layoffs, they liked his promises of a raise in minimum wages, of more welfare and less unemployment. They trusted his civil rights pledges (even though Nixon has a fine record on civil rights performance). Even Lyndon Johnson's longtime careful cultivation of the Negro press paid off; few were the editorial voices raised against him. Moreover, Democrats spent huge sums on advertising in the Negro papers, flooded Negro precincts with copies of Kennedy's message of support to the wife of Martin Luther King, who had been arrested in Georgia (Nixon missed his chance, uttered only a "no comment" on King's plight). The other minorities--Jews in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, Latin Americans in California, New Mexico and Texas--went solidly Democratic.

Farmers. Despite antipathy for Ezra Taft Benson, the voters in the farm states held fast to their Republican traditions, not alone out of anti-Catholic feeling: they knocked off some of their own Democratic leaders; e.g., Iowa's Governor Herschel Loveless was defeated for the U.S. Senate; Kansas Governor George Docking was dumped. Kennedy had promised farmers a program that even some of his own economists considered unsound; now owing little to farm support, he may be less eager to fight for it. Said a top Kennedy aide last week: "We sure don't owe the damn farmers anything."

Recession. The recession issue proved highly overrated. Such long-hurting areas as West Virginia voted for Kennedy. But California's San Diego County, hard-hit by airplane-plant layoffs, remained Republican; so did layoff areas around Seattle and Oregon's slumping lumber region.

Welfare. With the U.S. longevity rate increasing, a new special-interest group made itself felt more strongly than ever. In the West particularly, older people expressed concern for their welfare by supporting Kennedy for his Forand-type medical-aid-to-the-aged proposals. Somehow, Kennedy's program got across to old people more clearly than Dick Nixon's complicated aid-through-states plan. It almost certainly gave Kennedy his California lead.

Coattails. President Eisenhower's lastditch campaigning was credited with helping pull Ohio into the G.O.P. column, and he nearly turned the trick in New Jersey. Kennedy grabbed a few coattails. running behind Senator Paul Douglas and Gubernatorial Candidate Otto Kerner in Illinois, and in many other states trailed local Democratic front runners.

Slow March. Although some old Roosevelt-era party loyalties were revived, U.S. voters put on an impressive display of ticket splitting. Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Mexico went for Kennedy but elected Republican Governors. Indiana, Nebraska and North Dakota went for Nix on but elected Democratic Governors.

Delaware gave its three electoral votes to Kennedy but replaced a Democratic Senator with a Republican. Oregon gave Nixon a 40,000-vote majority but elected Democrat Maurine Neuberger to the Senate by 48,000 votes. Michigan, narrowly for Kennedy, chose a Democratic Governor and Senator but elected eleven of 18 Republican congressional candidates and put G.O.P. majorities in both houses of the state legislature.

One net result of all the ticket splitting was that, while some 50% of the electorate opted to follow John Kennedy out to the New Frontier, the new 87th Congress will be more conservative in makeup than the old. The G.O.P. gained two Senate seats (Delaware and Wyoming) and a net of 23 House seats (with four races still in doubt). The overall Democratic vote percentage in congressional races slipped from 56% in 1958 to 52%.

President Kennedy will still have hefty Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, plus that skilled legislative maestro, Lyndon Johnson, to help out on Capitol Hill, but Kennedy is likely to find that the old conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats can muster enough votes to keep him from marching toward the New Frontier very fast--and perhaps that is the way the voters intended it.

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