This always seemed quite odd to me both years as he lost the similar states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania both times. 1968 was even more surprising given Humphrey’s close proximity to the state as Minnesota’s Senator.
At this particular point, every prevailing Republican, with exception of Calvin Coolidge in 1924, carried the state of Wisconsin. (The state’s own Robert La Follete, the Progressive Party nominee, carried it in 1924. The former governor and U.S. senator died the next year.)
This helps to explain a 1968 Richard Nixon.
Elections 1960 and 1968 were party switches for the White House.
A 1960 Democratic pickup winner John Kennedy barely pulled through; meaning, his U.S. Popular Vote percentage-points margin was a bare +0.17.
Kennedy carried eight of the nation’s Top 10 populous states. Historically, every candidate—incumbent or otherwise—who carried seven or more of the Top 10 states won that given election. (The two Top 10 states not carried by Kennedy: California and Ohio.)
Since 1960, but with exception of 1992 Bill Clinton, all winning Democrats have carried +21 or +22 states in excess of their U.S. Popular Vote percentage-points margin.
Kennedy won nationally by +0.17 and carried 22 states. He won five of the seven states in the 1956 Democratic column for Adlai Stevenson: Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Kennedy carried a first-time participating Hawaii. Then, following a 1956 Stevenson’s U.S. Popular Vote margin of –15.40 percentage points with that 1960 Democratic pickup-winning +0.17—a national margin shift of +15.57—Kennedy flipped from the 1956 Republican [Dwight Eisenhower] to the 1960 Democratic column: New York; Pennsylvania; Illinois; Texas; Michigan; Massachusetts; New Jersey; Minnesota; Louisiana; Maryland; Connecticut; West Virginia; New Mexico; Rhode Island; Delaware; and Nevada.
Of the states in the 1960 Republican column, as 1956-to-1960 GOP holds, Wisconsin was six states following the Democrats’s cut-off. They were (from Democratic-to-Republican): California; a first-time participating Alaska; Washington; Montana; Florida; and Wisconsin. The margin in Wisconsin, for Richard Nixon, was +3.72 percentage points.
An interesting result with Election 1968, for a Republican pickup winner Richard Nixon, is this: He became the first winner of his party to not carry Pennsylvania or Michigan. Same is true with Minnesota. It should be noted that, from 1964 to 1984, but with exception in 1972, the Democrats had a Minnesotan on the Democratic ticket. Since after the 1950s, only with a 49-state re-elected Richard Nixon, in 1972, has the Republican Party carried Minnesota for U.S. President.
1968’s losing Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey was fortunate to not lose even more states—he held 13 of the 44 carried by a 1964 full-term-elected Lyndon Johnson—and that
this is more surprising. Wisconsin, as a 1968 Republican pickup, was Nixon’s No. 25 best-performed state. He carried 32. Of the states not carried, mentioned in this thread topic, Pennsylvania was No. 36; Michigan was No. 39; and Minnesota was No. 44.
In the most recent election cycles, dating back to 2004, Minnesota and New Hampshire have been voting alike. In Elections 2004 and 2016, the last two cycles lost by the Democratic Party, they slotted five consecutive numbers (the 2004 Democrats’s Nos. 15 to 19; the 2016 Democrats’s Nos. 19 to 23). This is why I think that with the next winning Republican map, likely due to a Republican pickup of the presidency, and given their proximity, all five will carry. (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are nowadays the nation’s top bellwether states.)
