It turns out that just last year John Fund wrote about JFK’s 1960 defeat in the popular vote . (With thanks to John for his usual lucidity–and apologies for having missed the article when it first appeared).

“The Associated Press reported that Kennedy’s

plurality was just 112,827 votes nationwide, a margin

of 49.7% to 49.5%. But was Kennedy, like George W.

Bush, actually a ‘minority president,’ elected without

a popular-vote plurality?

“It’s uncertain because in Alabama, JFK’s name didn’t

actually appear on the ballot. Voters were asked to

choose between Nixon and a slate of ‘unpledged

Democrat electors.’ A statewide primary had chosen

five Democratic electors who were ‘loyalists’ pledged

to JFK six who were free to vote for anyone.

“The Democratic slate defeated Nixon, 324,050 votes to

237,981. In the end, the six unpledged electors voted

for Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia, a leading Dixiecrat,

and the other five stuck with their pledge to Kennedy.

When the Associated Press at the time counted up the

popular vote from all 50 states it listed all the

Democratic votes, pledged and unpledged, in the

Kennedy column. Over the years other counts have

routinely assigned all of Alabama’s votes to Kennedy.”

“But scholars say that isn’t accurate. ‘Not all the

voters who chose those electors were for

Kennedy–anything but,’ says historian Albert

Southwick. Humphrey Taylor, the current chairman of

the polling firm Louis Harris & Associates (which

worked for Kennedy in 1960), acknowledges that in

Alabama ‘much of the popular vote . . . that is

credited to Kennedy’s line to give him a small

plurality nationally’ is dubious. ‘Richard Nixon seems

to have carried the popular vote narrowly, while

Kennedy won in the Electoral College,’ he concludes.”