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1960 United States presidential election in South Carolina

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All 8 South Carolina votes to the Electoral College
Nominee John F. Kennedy Richard Nixon Party Democratic Republican Home state Massachusetts California Running mate Lyndon B. Johnson Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Electoral vote 8 0 Popular vote 198,129 188,558 Percentage 51.24% 48.76%
County Results Kennedy   50-60%   60-70%   70-80% Nixon   50-60%   60-70%
President before election Dwight D. Eisenhower Republican Elected President John F. Kennedy Democratic

Elections in South Carolina
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The 1960 United States presidential election in South Carolina took place on November 8, 1960, as part of the 1960 United States presidential election. South Carolina voters chose eight representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

For six decades up to 1950 South Carolina was a one-party state dominated by the Democratic Party. The Republican Party had been moribund due to the disfranchisement of blacks and the complete absence of other support bases as South Carolina completely lacked upland or German refugee whites opposed to secession. Between 1900 and 1948, no Republican presidential candidate ever obtained more than seven percent of the total presidential vote – a vote which in 1924 reached as low as 6.6 percent of the total voting-age population (or approximately 15 percent of the voting-age white population).

Following Harry S. Truman’s To Secure These Rights in 1947, the following year South Carolina’s small electorate overwhelmingly rejected him in favour of state Governor Strom Thurmond, who won 71 percent of the state’s limited electorate and every county except poor white industrial Anderson and Spartanburg. During the 1950s, the state’s wealthier and more urbanized whites became extremely disenchanted with the national Democratic Party and to a lesser extent with the federal administration of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. However, the state’s abolition of its poll tax in 1950 allowed increasing white voter registration and the poor white upcountry provided enough support to national Democrat Adlai Stevenson II to, aided by substantial majorities amongst the small but increasing number of blacks able to vote, keep the state Democratic in the 1952 and 1956 elections.

During the 1950s, wealthy textile mill owners in the upcountry developed a grassroots state Republican Party dedicated to the tenets of the John Birch Society. This group nominated the most conservative delegation at the party’s 1960 convention. These wealthy businessmen would merge with hardline segregationists to draft Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination in 1960, and at the same time, the “Independents” in the lowcountry moved to support GOP nominees Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as they had in 1952. At the same time, Protestant clergymen in the state were quite outspoken against the nomination of Catholic Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy by the Democratic Party.

Both candidates toured the state in October, when James F. Byrnes, former governor, criticized severely the Kennedy platform as economically unaffordable and injurious to the states’ independence. In September and October polls, the state was considered likely to go for Nixon, and even on election night Nixon was leading until quite late when Kennedy overtook him. Kennedy ultimately won the state by 2.48 percentage points, being aided by an exceptional turnout for him amongst the state’s seventy-five thousand or so black voters, and by the loyalty of the pro-Stevenson upcountry despite its distaste for his Catholicism. Nixon won a narrow majority of the state’s white voters, and a strong majority amongst the wealthier whites of the growing Columbia and Charleston metropolitan areas.

This was the second to last time South Carolina voted Democratic. Had Gerald Ford won the state in 1976, South Carolina would share the nation's longest Republican streak.

Results

Results by county

Counties that flipped from Unpledged to Democratic

• Berkeley
• Clarendon
• Colleton
• Dorchester
• Edgefield
• Fairfield
• Florence
• Georgetown
• Lee

Counties that flipped from Democratic to Republican

• Greenville
• Hampton
• Jasper
• Kershaw
• Pickens

Counties that flipped from Unpledged to Republican

• Allendale
• Bamberg
• Calhoun
• Charleston
• Lexington
• Orangeburg
• Richland
• Sumter
• Williasburg

Notes

1. There was one write-in vote from Florence County

References

1. "United States Presidential election of 1960 – Encyclopædia Britannica". Retrieved June 8, 2017.
2. "1960 Election for the Forty-Fourth Term (1961-65)". Retrieved June 8, 2017.
3. Phillips, Kevin P. The Emerging Republican Majority. pp. 208, 210. ISBN 9780691163246.
4. Mickey, Robert. Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972. p. 440. ISBN 0691149631.
5. Mickey. Paths Out of Dixie, p. 27
6. Frederikson, Kari. The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968. p. 185. ISBN 9780807875445.
7. Graham, Cole Blease; Moore, William V. South Carolina Politics and Government. pp. 79, 81. ISBN 9780803270435.
8. Bedingfield, Sid (2014). Beating Down the Fear: The Civil Sphere and Political Change in South Carolina, 1940-1962 (Thesis). University of South Carolina Dissertations. p. 164. Docket 2793.
9. ^ Mickey. Paths out of Dixie, p. 234
10. See Cassels, Louis (November 9, 1960). "Old Axoim of U.S. History Now in History's Junk Pie". Spokane Chronicle. p. 4.
11. "I'll Win with You, Dick Telles Dixie". Miami Herald. November 4, 1960. p. 35.
12. Hoffman, Fred S. (October 18, 1960). "A.P. Poll Shows Jack Nears Nixon". Fort Worth Star-Telegram. p. 3.
13. "Wins in South Carolina". The Paducah Sun. November 9, 1960. p. 7.
14. "1960 Presidential General Election Results – South Carolina". Retrieved June 8, 2017.
15. "The American Presidency Project – Election of 1960". Retrieved June 8, 2017.
16. Mickey. Paths out of Dixie, p. 233
17. Phillips. The Emerging Republican Majority, p. 263

v t e State and district results of the 1960 United States presidential election
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• 1960 United States presidential election by state
• United States presidential elections in South Carolina
• 1960 South Carolina elections