Electoral college in 1960/1964/1968 - why did Mississippi and Alabama vote so oddly?

[ChickenGuy]

I was looking at the results from previous elections, and I noticed that they were voting very strangely in all three of these years, and unlike any other state.

What was going on?


1960 - Kennedy v. Nixon

Mississippi voted 'Unpledged' whose Electors in the College then cast their ballot for Harry Byrd and Strom Thurmond, and Alabama did the same for half of their number of Electors, despite Byrd/Thurmond not being on the ballot and getting 0 votes officially in that state.


1964 - Johnson v. Goldwater

In a landslide for Johnson with 44 states going his way and many heavily, Mississippi instead voted Goldwater with an unprecedented 87% of the electorate, and Alabama second-strongest with 69%.


1968 - Nixon v. Humphrey

There were 5 states in the South that voted instead for George Wallace, and Mississippi and Alabama were the only two states where he got over half of the overall vote with 66% and 63%.


I pretty much assume this was all about racism and desegregation?

Were the Southern states that incensed by the whole issue that they made it their ONLY priority when voting en masse for (I assume) white supremacists in Election year?

Thanks in advance for any info and historical perspective.

 

[Zingerific]

Goldwater and Nixon started what is now well known as the GOP's "southern strategy." Basically, the formerly solidly Democratic south was in flux during the period -- which is why a Democrat like Wallace ran a third party campaign to the right of Nixon in 1968.

1960 is more of a puzzle. Right off the top of my head, I'd guess that there might have been some anti-Kennedy bias due to his Catholicism, and possibly some anti-Johnson feeling for shepherding the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 through the Senate.

 

[Crotchshaver]

As someone who grew up as a white child in Mississippi in the '60s and who first campaigned for a political candidate when I was 7 years old, the sad answer to your question is: Yes.

These votes were in reaction to the Democratic Party's support for desegregation that essentially began with President Truman's order to integrate the military in 1948. This was the impetus for the "state's rights" movement known as the Dixiecrats that nominated Strom Thurmond for president. Before then, the South was so solidly Democrat since Reconstruction that it gave rise to the notion that a Southerner would sooner vote for a "yellow dog" before he would vote for a Republican.

President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, helped push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in an effort to end desegregation, but at a political cost of, as legend has him saying, "We have lost the South for a generation," which proved to be an understatement.

It should be noted, however, that there is a distinct difference between the majority who peacefully voted then to keep the status quo of racial segregation and the white supremacist minority who advocated violence to maintain desegregation.


Even today, nearly half a century later, the sad vestiges of this sentiment remain, as evidenced by the fact that Mississippi, with the highest percentage of black residents in the U.S. at about 37%, the first nonwhite presidential nominee of a major political party carried only 43% of the state's votes.

 

[frankfrank]

@ZINGERIFIC...for some reason the "quote" function on JUB seems to be entirely broken at the moment.

You and Crotchshaver have given a good overview as to what was in play during the times, and the 1968 Wallace thing was most definitely racism rearing its head. Notice Crotchshaver's "middle" paragraph - he has given the relevant time frame for what caused the 1964 Mississippi anomaly, because during 1963 and 1964, Ground Zero for racial tensions coalesced in Mississippi, after some notable murders of civil rights pioneers (with much of the state thinking that was a GOOD thing, to kill that scourge .

 

[bw92116]

In 1964 the country was pretty much still in a state of shock over the JFK assassination. So it was not a "normal" election, in my opinion.

 

[MisterMajestic]

In 1964 the country was pretty much still in a state of shock over the JFK assassination. So it was not a "normal" election, in my opinion.

Your opinion is really an understatement....NOTHING was NORMAL about ANY Election before & during that decade when you consider the Voting Rights Act didnt pass until 1965....Black & White Americans died fighting the good fight for Civil Rights....Do you remember Blacks were denied the Right to vote and had to pay crazy fees or guess the number of Bubbles in a bar of soap? That was some insane BullShit...

We gotta be careful here going down memory lane....We're all different ages, races and we all have a different definition for the word NORMAL...My NORMAL might not be the same as your NORMAL....

 

[Zingerific]

Your opinion is really an understatement....NOTHING was NORMAL about ANY Election before & during that decade when you consider the Voting Rights Act didnt pass until 1965....Black & White Americans died fighting the good fight for Civil Rights....Do you remember Blacks were denied the Right to vote and had to pay crazy fees or guess the number of Bubbles in a bar of soap? That was some insane BullShit...

We gotta be careful here going down memory lane....We're all different ages, races and we all have a different definition for the word NORMAL...My NORMAL might not be the same as your NORMAL....

You're right, 'normal' is a relative term. In fairness to bw9119, however, I think he was talking about general trends in the 60s, and how the general trends therein are hard to figure out.

Anyway, I think we all need to go down memory lane a bit more. We'd all probably learn a bit from history were we to actually study it.

I'm NOT normal... and I really don't choose to be friends with anyone so anodyne. To be frank, MisterMajestic, I don't know why you privilage it. In my mind, 'normal' is something I strive not to be.

Anyway, I appreciate your (sorta) bringing up race in this discussion. There is too little of discussion of the issue on the left. (There is plenty of it on the right.)

 

[MisterMajestic]

I'm NOT normal... and I really don't choose to be friends with anyone so anodyne. To be frank, MisterMajestic, I don't know why you privilage it. In my mind, 'normal' is something I strive not to be.

You say that you're not Normal and don't strive to be Normal...That is perfectly fine and its not debatable..That still doesnt change the Fact that we all define the word normal in a different way....That's not my opinion that is a fact.....You don't have to make this about yourself to prove a point...We're talking about the 60's and what went down.....