1960 United States presidential election in Tennessee

The 1960 United States presidential election in Tennessee took place on November 8, 1960, as part of the 1960 United States presidential election. Tennessee voters chose 11 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

Ever since the Civil War, Tennessee’s white citizenry had been divided according to political loyalties established in that war. Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the Western Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne voted Republican — generally by landslide margins — as they saw the Democratic Party as the "war party" who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight. Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state's secession were equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction. The Democratic Party was certain of winning statewide elections if united, although unlike the Deep South Republicans would almost always gain thirty to forty percent of the statewide vote from mountain and Highland Rim support even after most blacks were disenfranchised around 1890 by a poll tax and intimidation.

Between 1896 and 1948, the Republicans would win statewide contests three times but only in the second amiss the national anti-Wilson tide of 1920 did they receive down-ballot coattails by winning three congressional seats in addition to the rock-ribbed GOP First and Second Districts. After the beginning of the Great Depression, however, for the next third of a century the Republicans would rarely contest statewide offices seriously despite continuing dominance of East Tennessee and half a dozen Unionist counties in the middle and west of the state. State GOP leader B. Carroll Reece is widely believed to have had agreements with E. H. Crump and later Frank G. Clement and Buford Ellington that Republicans would not contest offices statewide or outside their traditional pro-Union areas. Despite this, the capture of a substantial part of the West Tennessee Dixiecrat vote of 1948 allowed Dwight D. Eisenhower to narrowly carry the state for the GOP in both 1952 and 1956.

For 1960, the nomination of Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy by the Democratic Party — who had made major gains in the 1958 midterm elections — led to severe questioning of how Tennessee’s heavily fundamentalist electorate would react to Kennedy’s Catholicism.

Campaign
During the campaign, both Kennedy and Republican nominee incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon visited Tennessee in the second week of October. Kennedy focused on Nixon’s supposed opposition to the Tennessee Valley Authority, whilst Nixon focused on how his platform was closer to that of the Founding Fathers and Andrew Jackson than Kennedy’s. Kennedy, for his part, noted that the Democratic Party was founded by Tennessean Jackson.

Analysis
Tennessee was, despite unclear predictions before the election, comfortably won by Nixon and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., with 52.92 percent of the popular vote. Kennedy and running mate Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson won 45.77 percent of the popular vote.

Nixon was the first losing Republican to win Tennessee, and the only one until John McCain in 2008. Kennedy was the first Democrat to win without the state since 1852. Nixon’s win was due to general gains due to the strong anti-Catholicism of this “Bible Belt” state. Unlike Herbert Hoover’s 1928 victory against previous Catholic nominee Al Smith, Nixon also made strong gains amongst white voters of the Black Belt who had deserted the Democrats since Harry S. Truman’s first civil rights proclamations.