Well, back to the thread:
The 1960 results with Kennedy winning by 32 points over Nixon might seem surprising. One can assume that this county was (and is) overwhelmingly Protestant. Kennedy was clearly liberal on the race/civil rights issues. Heck, he visited Martin Luther King in jail late in the campaign. Also, Kennedy's religion certainly hurt him in parts of the South (Kentucky, Tennessee). I think what was at play here in Holmes County was the deep South's antipathy toward voting for any Republican back then (no matter who the opponent Democrat might have been). You can also see this trend reflected in Nixon's poor showings in Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Back to the religious thread, perhaps in Kentucky and Tennessee, there were enough Catholics for the populace at large to be aware of and made sure they voted against. In the deep South states, I think the numbers of Catholics were so tiny, the general population didn't even perceive the religion of the President to be an issue. They just assumed every American was Protestant.
Good points there. This is getting slightly off topic but has anyone discussed the possibility of an anti-catholic vote in the Midwest in 1960? Seems to me that several counties in the Midwest, particularly in the Corn Belt, were unusually republican that year. Granted this was a very republican area back then (more so than now in most cases) but I'm wondering if Kennedy would have performed better had he not been catholic.
