NY Catholics were less likely to vote JFK

[Alben Barkley]

I know my devout catholic grandmother from New York did not vote for JFK because he was more pro-choice than Nixon. Maybe it was a feeling of him being a catholic traitor to some people?

I didn't even realize abortion was such a federal issue in 1960 to the point where presidential candidates would have their stances be on the record

She was very focused on that issue, maybe more so than your average person. I guess Nixon talked against abortion more and that swayed very pro-life people like her. She was the Right to Life nominee for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1990

Hate to say it but your grandma is full of it. Abortion was not a national political issue in 1960 and it was not part of either Nixon or JFK's campaign. Neither took a stance on it, and I would be very surprised if either talked about it at all during that election, let alone if one did enough to sway people over the issue. Maybe "full of it" is too harsh and your grandma is just misremembering things. But there most definitely was not a common perception in 1960 that JFK was a "Catholic traitor" because of abortion, to say the least.

Hell, the GOP stance on abortion wasn't even clear by the time it actually became nationally legal with Roe v. Wade; Nixon did not oppose the ruling. There is no way in hell that he was railing against it in 1960. JFK wasn't talking pro-choice either. The only way this is true is if your grandma was the only person in the country who thought, for some reason, that Nixon was the "pro-life" candidate and JFK the "pro-choice" candidate at a time when those terms would be anachronistic and neither candidate had actually taken a position on the issue. And then was a single-issue voter over this issue that didn't exist in the election. I find that highly improbable at best, sorry.

More likely she was projecting backwards her views on abortion and her faith decades later, associating the GOP (and by extension Nixon) with the pro-life position and the Democrats (and by extension JFK) with the pro-choice position after these had actually become the parties' dominant positions and the issue was actually prominent. She might have convinced herself that was how she felt at the time and voted based on it, even if she didn't in reality. Human memory is fuzzy that way and we're prone to filling in lost details with newer information that distorts it. This becomes worse the farther removed we get from the actual time we are "remembering." It's a phenomenon that explains how all sorts of things get exaggerated or conflated over time.