1956 United States presidential election in Alabama

The 1956 United States presidential election in Alabama took place on November 6, 1956, as part of the 1956 United States presidential election. Alabama voters chose eleven representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president. In Alabama, voters voted for electors individually instead of as a slate, as in the other states.

Since the 1890s, Alabama had been effectively a one-party state ruled by the Democratic Party. Disenfranchisement of almost all African-Americans and a large proportion of poor whites via poll taxes, literacy tests and informal harassment had essentially eliminated opposition parties outside of Unionist Winston County and presidential campaigns in a few nearby northern hill counties. The only competitive statewide elections during this period were thus Democratic Party primaries — limited to white voters until the landmark court case of Smith v. Allwright, following which Alabama introduced the Boswell Amendment — ruled unconstitutional in Davis v. Schnell in 1949, although substantial increases in black voter registration would not occur until after the late 1960s Voting Rights Act.

Unlike other Deep South states, the state GOP would after disenfranchisement rapidly and permanently turn “lily-white”, with the last black delegates at any Republican National Convention serving in 1920. Nevertheless, Republicans only briefly gained from their hard lily-white policy by exceeding forty percent in three 1920 House of Representatives races, and in the 1928 presidential election when Senator James Thomas Heflin embarked on a nationwide speaking tour, partially funded by the Ku Klux Klan, against Roman Catholic Democratic nominee Al Smith, so that Republican Herbert Hoover lost by only seven thousand votes.

Following Smith, Alabama’s loyalty to the national Democratic Party would be broken when Harry S. Truman, seeking a strategy to win the Cold War against the radically egalitarian rhetoric of Communism, launched the first Civil Rights bill since Reconstruction. Southern Democrats became enraged and for the 1948 presidential election, Alabama’s Democratic presidential elector primary chose electors who were pledged to not vote for incumbent President Truman. Truman was entirely excluded from the Alabama ballot, and Alabama’s electoral votes went to Strom Thurmond — labelled as the “Democratic” nominee — by a margin only slightly smaller than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four victories. Despite this, in 1950 loyalists regained control of the ruling party and few would support Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.

In the four ensuing years, Alabama’s ruling elite was jolted by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which ruled unconstitutional the de jure segregated school system in the South. The state attempted to use the doctrine of “interposition” to place its sovereignty above the Court and maintain de jure segregation, although incumbent Governor Jim Folsom viewed the idea as futile despite signing the statutes. The state would also be affected by the Montgomery bus boycott, and as a result an independent elector slate, not pledged to any candidate, would be nominated.

Analysis
As expected by the polls, Alabama voted for the Democratic nominees Adlai Stevenson II and running mate Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, with 56.52 percent of the popular vote against Republican–nominees incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, with 39.39 percent. Eisenhower’s performance was nonetheless the second-best by a Republican in Alabama since 1884, when many blacks were still enfranchised, while Stevenson declined by eight percent compared to his 1952 performance. Eisenhower’s main gains were in upper- and middle-class urban areas, where wealthier whites aligned strongly with GOP economic policies. The unpledged slate had little support and consequently did not make the impact it did in South Carolina, Mississippi or Louisiana, cracking twenty percent only in Lowndes County.

Stevenson received ten of Alabama’s eleven electoral votes; the eleventh was cast by a faithless elector for Walter B. Jones.

, this is the last election in which Macon County voted for a Republican nominee, and the only election since Reconstruction that this majority-black county has voted Republican. It is also the last time that Houston County voted for a Democratic nominee, and the last time that the state has supported a losing Democratic nominee or that a Republican won two terms without ever carrying the state.