11/13/00 3:45 p.m.
Nixon Defeats Kennedy!
Did Nixon win the popular vote in 1960?

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

he history books say John F. Kennedy not only beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 Electoral College vote, but also in the national vote — though only by a hair. This latter victory, meaningless in any constitutional sense, carries with it an important kind of claim, as Vice President Gore and George W. Bush are now discovering. The winner is said, as Bill Daley put it last week, to be "the people's choice."

Yet JFK may not have won the popular vote, even if we set aside all the charges of fraud in Illinois and Texas. JFK is typically credited with 57 percent of the vote in Alabama. But he probably doesn't deserve it. Here's George Mason University's Gordon Tullock, in a letter published by the New York Review of Books on November 10, 1988:

The year 1960 was a period in which the southern whites after a long, long period of solid support of Democrats were beginning their shift into their present Republican voting in presidential elections. As a first step in that direction, a number of 'true Democratic' movements were set up in the South, the purpose of which was to avoid endorsing that national Democratic candidates and at the same time not endorse the national Republican candidates. Alabama has a primary election for presidential electors. In the primary election a slate of anti-Kennedy electors won six of the seven nominations and five were won by pro-Kennedy electors. The six anti-Kennedy electors then proceeded to carry on a vigorous and active campaign. The pro-Kennedy electors stayed home and said nothing. The ultimate outcome was 324,000 for all eleven Democratic electors. The anti-Kennedy electors received eight thousand more votes than the pro-Kennedy electors.

The popular vote is very difficult to disentangle. The above figures [published in a reference guide, and crediting JFK with 324,050 Alabama votes and RN with 237,981] assume that the people who voted for all eleven of the electors were pro-Kennedy. Obviously, this is too simple, but what should be substituted for it is by no means obvious. I personally would suggest that we simply discard all these votes in the popular total on the grounds that we can't tell what these voters thought. Another possibility would be to divide the popular vote cast for these eleven electors in the same ratio as the popular vote in the earlier primary. Either of these corrections would lead to Nixon's having more popular votes nationally than Kennedy.

It's something Al Gore may want to keep in mind this week.