Alabama in 1960

[rob in cal]

  Alabama in 1960 intrigues me because there were both pro and anti Kennedy Democrats on the ballot as electors, which voters chose directly, and thus there was a form of a unity Democrat slate running, unlike in Mississippi where there was an explicitly anti Kennedy unpledged elector slate running on its own.  As it turns out apparently most Dems chose both pro and anti Kennedy electors, helping to muddy the waters on what their true preferences were.

Some questions that come up, are first, what was the typical Democrat thinking when they voted for the various Democrat electors. Did most know that they were voting for a mixed 6 unpledged,5 pledged to Kennedy slate? Did many think well I really don't want to vote for Kennedy at all, but this mix of electors seems an ok compromise?  Was it well known in the campaign that this was the make up of the electors, or did most votes think they were just voting for Kennedy?

Finally, if there had been a totally independent unpledged elector slate running like in Mississippi and Louisiana, how far does Kennedy's vote drop off. My guess is that the Nixon vote stays about the same, but Kennedy loses a lot of votes to unpledged, question is does Kennedy lose enough to give a clean popular vote victory to Nixon. Some argue that Nixon won the popular vote nationwide by giving Kennedy only 5/11 of the Dem total vote, but that seems too low, and the other approach is to give the highest vote that went to his top running electoral college delegate to Kennedy, but most of the voters who chose that delegate also voted for unpledged electors as well (there was some drop off with Kennedy's highest delegate running a little behind the highest unpledged delegate as clearly some voters didn't chose all 11 electors.)

I guess this boils down to this. How many of the roughly 317k voters that Kennedy is credited with in Alabama were really voting for him, and how many of those voters true preference was for the unpledged delegates.

[DistingFlyer]

Given that the primary resulted in six unpledged electors and five Kennedy electors being selected in the first place, it was probably a fairly even split (just as it was in Mississippi).

[cafaulait37]

This website shows the county results.

babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4046977&view=1up&seq=667

In Clarke County, the top 11 electors were the 6 unpledged and 5 Nixon electors, but the overwhelming majority of voters just went straight D or straight R.

[Chips]

If you choose to count the 324,000 Democratic votes as divided between Byrd and Kennedy 6/5, Nixon wins both Alabama and the national popular vote.