United States presidential election in Mississippi, 1960

← 1956

November 8, 1960

1964 →

All eight Mississippi votes to the Electoral College


Nominee	Unpledged electors Harry F. Byrd	John F. Kennedy	Richard Nixon
Party	Southern Democrat	Democratic	Republican
Home state	Virginia	Massachusetts	California
Running mate	Strom Thurmond	Lyndon B. Johnson	Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
Electoral vote	8	0	0
Popular vote	116,248	108,362	73,561
Percentage	39.0%	36.3%	24.7%

The 1960 United States presidential election in Mississippi took place on November 8, 1960 as part of the 1960 United States presidential election. Voters chose eight representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice President. This was the last election in which Mississippi had eight electoral votes: the Great Migration caused the state to lose congressional districts for the third time in four censuses before the next election.

The election saw the only case of a state being carried by a slate of unpledged electors. The Magnolia State voted narrowly for this slate, who voted unanimously for long-time Virginia Senator and political machine director Harry Flood Byrd, over the national Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy. Republican nominee and outgoing vice-President Richard Nixon came in third, with his percentage of the vote practically unchanged from what President Dwight D. Eisenhower recorded in 1956.

Governor Ross Barnett, a rabid segregationist, was faced with a severe dilemma upon becoming governor at the beginning of the year owing to the rigid opposition of Mississippi’s limited and almost exclusively white electorate to the active Civil Rights Movement. Pressured by the “Citizens’ Council” who wished to unite the South behind a white-supremacist Democratic candidate, Governor Barnett repeated James P. Coleman’s strategy from 1956 and nominated two sets of Democratic Party electors for the Presidential ballot. The first slate was pledged to Kennedy, while the other was not pledged to any candidate. The aim of placing unpledged electors on the ballot was to gain leverage from either major party in a close election.

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