What Percent of Americans Would Voter for Nixon Again
The 1960 election campaign was dominated by rise Cold War tensions betwixt the United States and the Soviet Spousal relationship. In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. American leaders warned that the nation was falling behind communist countries in science and technology. Three years later, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory and its airplane pilot captured. The incident led to the cancellation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower'southward planned trip to Moscow and the plummet of a height meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
In Cuba, the revolutionary authorities of Fidel Castro became a shut ally of the Soviet Union, heightening fears of communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere. Public opinion polls revealed that more than half the American people thought war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.
The Candidates
John Fitzgerald Kennedy captured the Autonomous nomination despite his youth, a seeming lack of feel in strange affairs, and his Catholic faith. On May x, he won a solid victory in the Autonomous primary in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia. His success there launched him toward a first ballot victory at the national convention in Los Angeles—although he did non reach the 761 votes required for the nomination until the final state in the roll call, Wyoming.
After choosing Texas senator Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy told the convention delegates that he would become the nation moving again. He declared that the United States would accept the volition and the strength to resist communism around the world.
The Republican nominee, Vice President Richard M. Nixon was 47-years-old, just four years older than Kennedy. He pointed to the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower assistants and assured the voters that he would maintain American prestige, leadership, and military strength. He chose Henry Cabot Gild, US administrator to the United Nations, as his running mate. Nixon struck many voters equally more mature and experienced than Kennedy and led in the polls after the national conventions.
Both candidates sought the support of the steadily growing suburban population and, for the first time, television became the dominant source of information for voters.
The Debates
The Kennedy and Nixon campaigns agreed to a series of televised debates. Many in the Nixon camp, including President Eisenhower, urged the vice president to decline the debate proposal and deny Kennedy invaluable national exposure. Just, a good debater, Nixon confidently agreed to share a platform with his rival on nationwide television.
In 1950, only eleven per centum of American homes had television; by 1960, the number had jumped to 88 percentage. An estimated seventy one thousand thousand Americans, most two-thirds of the electorate, watched the first fence on September 26th.
Kennedy had met the day before with the producer to talk over the design of the set and the placement of the cameras. Nixon, just out of the hospital afterwards a painful knee injury, did non take reward of this opportunity. Kennedy wore a blue adapt and shirt to cutting down on glare and appeared sharply focused against the grey studio background. Nixon wore a grayness suit and seemed to blend into the set. Most importantly, JFK spoke direct to the cameras and the national audience. Nixon, in traditional debating style, appeared to be responding to Kennedy.
Almost overnight the issues of feel and maturity seemed to fade from the campaign. Nixon seemed much more poised and relaxed in the three subsequent debates, just it was the first run across that helped to reshape the election.
Religion and Ceremonious Rights
Kennedy tried to identify himself with the liberal reform tradition of the Autonomous political party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, promising a new surge of legislative innovation in the 1960s. He hoped to pull together key elements of the Roosevelt coalition of the 1930s—urban communities of color, ethnicity-based voting blocs, and organized labor. He also hoped to win back bourgeois Catholics who had deserted the Democrats to vote for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and to hold his own in the South.
In September, John F. Kennedy eloquently confronted the religious issue in an advent earlier the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He said, "I believe in an America where the separation of church building and state is accented; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President—should he be Catholic—how to human action, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." But anti-Catholic feeling remained a wild card in the entrada.
Civil rights had emerged equally a crucial issue in the 1960 campaign. Kennedy faced the claiming of promoting policies that white southern Democrats supported while, at the aforementioned time, courtship Black voters away from the Republican Party, the political party that many Black voters aligned with afterwards the Civil War because it was the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation.
Simply a few weeks before the election, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested while participating in a protest in Atlanta, Georgia. Although it was politically risky, John Kennedy phoned his wife, Coretta Scott King, to express his concern, while a call from Robert Kennedy to the judge helped secure her hubby's condom release. The Kennedys' personal intervention led to a public endorsement past Martin Luther King Sr., the influential father of the civil rights leader. The publicizing of this endorsement, combined with other campaign efforts, contributed to increased back up among Black voters for Kennedy.
Downward to the Wire
In the terminal days of the campaign, the immensely pop President Eisenhower began a speaking tour on behalf of Republican candidates. Several primal states seemed to shift toward Nixon, and past Ballot Day pollsters were declaring the ballot a toss-up.
On Nov viii, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. In the popular vote, his margin over Nixon was 118,550 out of a total of near 69 million votes cast. His success in many urban and industrial states gave him a clear bulk of 303 to 219 in the balloter vote. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest man e'er elected president, the first Cosmic, and the starting time president born in the twentieth century.
Source: https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/campaign-of-1960
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