Everyone always talks about the effect that the televised debates had on making Kennedy look good, but I’ve always wondered if there was a flip side to this: Where lack of tv among poor white southern Democrats may have kept them in the dark about Kennedy’s policy platform and more elitist liberal catholic yankee leanings.
When you look at the 1960 electoral map it’s seemingly the craziest election landscape of the century. The party that would end up passing the Civil Rights Act 4 years later swept the Deep South. Now I’m sure there was probably a higher turnout rate for African Americans and women and other more “liberal” voting blocs, but I really don’t see how he could have won almost every confederate state without a significant amount of Southern Democrats just voting for their traditional party without reading the fine print.
Are there any good sources that go into this at all? Were there a lot of conservative good ol boys that expressed regret or anger about voting for the Democrat and getting hoodwinked when he turned out to be the opposite of what they wanted?
Or is it possible that civil rights and integration and stuff just wasn’t a big campaign issue in 1960? Did all the racists and pro-segregation crowd just like Kennedy’s foreign policy and funny accent so much that they never bothered to ask what his thoughts were on the controversial policies they wanted to protect? Or was it that Kennedy might likely have done nothing about civil rights and Southern Democrats just weren’t worried about it?
Like just how in the hell did a New England liberal Catholic win in Texas in 1960 without there being some kind of miscommunication?
JFK’s support amongst southern “yellow dog” democrats began in the mid 1950’s when he was still a senator from Massachusetts. He was seen by many Southern Democrats as a “compromise candidate” who had not yet made many provocative “liberal” statements on Civil Rights, in comparison to other leading Democrats such as Adlai Stevenson or Estes Kefauver. During the 1956 presidential campaign JFK was an active surrogate in the South — think of the way people responded somewhat recently to Beto, but imagine he’s even more attractive and well spoken. After the 1956 election Kennedy actively courted party support in the south and built a “grass roots” network amongst local party leaders (parties were much stronger in the 1950s than they are today) and worked with moderate segregationists who sought to maintain segregation without actively going after groups like the NAACP (I’m aware “moderate segregationists” sounds absurd by today’s standards but this is ~1958). The more radical Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond were already abandoning the party at this point.
In addition to the above, Kennedy had Johnson on his side, who more or less controlled the Texas delegation. Kennedy’s more liberal policies during the ‘50s were mostly focused on labor, which the still deeply unionized South* [edit: compared to today] (Which Side Are You On? comes out of West Virginia, after all) appreciated. Kennedy essentially refused to comment on Civil Rights during speeches in the South. By this point the Eisenhower administration was also being vilified by hardline segregationists for their perceived support of desegregation, most notably over the Little Rock Nine.
So, Kennedy was seen as a moderate compared to other Democrats while Nixon was perceived as somewhat pro-Civil Rights due to Ike’s actions. Democratic political machines were still extremely powerful, particularly in Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. LBJ campaigned energetically on Kennedy’s behalf and he delivered.