How did Kennedy win Nevada in 1960?

[Plankton5165]

Clark County wasn't even his best county!

[MIKESOWELL]

Maybe mob shenanigans helped a bit? I don't know this for sure, but Nevada seems like the type of state that Kennedy might have campaigned more extensively in compared to Nixon.

[mianfei]

Nevada – and Arizona – were over the first half of the twentieth century, more Democratic than any other state outside the South.

In Arizona’s case that was because the state maintained the same type of race relations with non-voting minority populations as did Deep South states (from which its white population descended). In fact, Hispanic and Native American populations in Arizona were enfranchised later than blacks in Mississippi or Alabama, with significant voting thereby dating back only to the 1970 revision of the Voting Rights Act which eliminated literacy tests – although local white voters in majority-Hispanic and Native American counties were never so obsessed with race as Black Belt white electorates in the Deep South. When the Democratic Party abandoned its commitment to traditional race relations, Arizona – then as one-party Democratic at state level as the South – rapidly turned Republican even down-ballot.

In the case of Nevada this was because it maintained Bryan-era Populist-descended support as other western states failed to do, and before mass immigration from Mexico its extreme southern reaches also had the same Southern leanings as Arizona. Nevada also developed substantial unionised mining communities – e.g. in White Pine County in the far northeast. Moreover, there was little anti-Catholic sentiment in Nevada like there was in the highly secular and liberal Pacific Northwest (1959 saw Washington become the first state to legalise abortion), and Nevada also had significant Catholic communities descended from Basque sheepherders in its remote interior.

Consequently, Nevada’s Democratic loyalities were unaffected until after the social revolutions of the 1960s, when populist congressman Walter S. Baring endorsed George Wallace, who consequently did better in some remote counties of Nevada than anywhere else outside antebellum slave states and Oklahoma. This Republican trend was strong during the next five elections, when McGovern, Carter (in 1980), Mondale and Dukakis all lost every county in the Silver State.