New York,” although “Clay, the savvy head counter, had known all along that New York was the key to the contest.”10
That election marked the first of 10 times in the modern era (beginning in 1828) where the result in a single, closely contested state made the difference in the election. Those other elections are 1848, 1876, 1880, 1884, 1888, 1916, 1976, 2000, and 2004. In each of those elections, if the loser had won just one state he lost by a close margin (less than five points), he would have won the election. Additionally, in 1968, if Democrat Hubert Humphrey had won California and its 40 electoral votes (he lost by about three points to Republican Richard Nixon), he and George Wallace, the former Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president as an independent conservative, would have combined to deny Nixon an Electoral College majority, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, something that has not happened since 1824. Had that happened, Humphrey likely would have won, because Democrats controlled 26 of 50 US House delegations. (When a presidential election goes to the House, each state gets a single vote, which presumably would go to the candidate whose party controlled that state’s House delegation.)
So there’s a long history of a single state making the difference in a close election. The nature of the United States’ Electoral College allows for the possibility that a single state, closely fought, can determine the victor.
In a year with a big wave, states that ordinarily vote for one party will often vote for the other. States that aren’t usually competitive turn into swing states, but that doesn’t mean their results will look like the nation’s.
Minnesota has the longest streak of voting Democratic for president of any state in the country (the District of Columbia’s stretches back even further, but DC is not a state, to the chagrin of its residents). The North Star State has voted for a Democrat in every election since 1976, withstanding even incumbent Ronald Reagan’s 49-state reelection tide in 1984. The state instead opted that year for former Vice President Walter Mondale, who had also served as a senator from Minnesota, by less than 4,000 votes. Reagan won 59 percent to 41 percent nationally, but Mondale won his home state 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round that up to a 50–50 tie, meaning the state was nine points more Democratic and nine points less Republican than the national average. Thus, it was still far to the left of the nation’s center, and had Mondale not been a home-state candidate, perhaps even this reliably Democratic state would have voted for Reagan. Again, Minnesota was a swing state that year, but it definitely was not a bellwether. It was just that the Democratic wave in the tide pool, to borrow Trende’s analogy, was little more than a puddle, so low that it barely colored even a very Democratic state with a favorite-son candidate’s blue.
Meanwhile, the number of states like Ohio—the bellwethers, the ones that stick close to the national average vote in both nail-biters and routs—has been dwindling.
THE ARCHAIC (BUT AT THE TIME, DEFENSIBLE) 50-STATE STRATEGY
Two days before losing an achingly close election to Democrat John F. Kennedy, Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon campaigned in a state that had previously never cast an electoral vote for president.
On November 6, 1960, Nixon spoke in Anchorage, Alaska, completing an ambitious pledge to campaign in all 50 states. As he pointed out, “This is indeed, a historic moment. It is one that will never be duplicated. This is the first time in the history of the United States that a candidate for the Presidency of either party has visited all of the 50 States of this country.”11
This was a promise Nixon had made in his convention speech in Chicago: “In this campaign we are going to take no states for granted, and we aren’t going to concede any states to the opposition.”12 So Nixon visited places he would lose by 25 points, like Georgia: “I think it’s time for the Democratic candidates for the presidency to quit taking Georgia and the South for granted,” he said in Atlanta on August 26.13 He would also visit Vermont, which would back him by 17 points: “Speaking to you here in the state, speaking to you particularly as a state that traditionally votes Republican, I would like to present the case for our national ticket, not just on Republican lines. That would be the easiest thing to do. I know that in this audience are people who are predominantly Republican.”14 Later, in the aforementioned Anchorage speech, he would proclaim that it made no difference: “As far as I am concerned, North, East, West, or South, it’s all part of America and a candidate for the presidency should go to every state so that he knows what America is all about—and that’s why I’m here.”
Nixon’s 50-state gimmick is perhaps one of the reasons he lost the election. Might his time in Alaska have been better spent in Illinois, Missouri, or New Jersey, states with more electoral votes, states that Nixon lost by less than a percentage point each? “All through the campaign,” wrote Theodore White in his definitive The Making of the President 1960, “as the race narrowed and it became obvious that it would be won or lost in the teetering industrial northeastern states, Nixon was cramped by his public pledge—so that on the last week end of the campaign, as Kennedy barnstormed through populous Illinois, New Jersey, New York and New England, Nixon found himself committed to fly all the way north to Alaska, which offered only three electoral votes.”15
As strange as it seems today to imagine a presidential candidate spending some of the final hours of the campaign in Anchorage, it actually was not so crazy back then. In their first elections, both Alaska and Hawaii were rightly regarded as battlegrounds. If Nixon’s visiting Alaska was so foolish, then the Kennedy strategy was perhaps even more boneheaded: JFK made not just one, but two visits to Alaska during his campaign (the state went to Nixon by 1,144 votes). And while Kennedy did not visit every state, he did campaign in 43 of them, so JFK’s strategy was nearly as nationalized as Nixon’s was.16 Maybe Nixon’s mistake was not making the pledge, but instead saving a time-consuming Alaska trip for the end of the campaign instead of knocking it out earlier on.
Furthermore, while Nixon was the first presidential candidate to campaign in every state, candidates of both parties often campaigned across the nation back then. In his 1952 victory, for instance, Eisenhower campaigned in 45 of 48 states.17
A half century earlier, the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, by his own count, visited 29 of 45 states in his 1896 campaign, traveling more than 18,000 miles and delivering 570 speeches.18 Republican William McKinley, meanwhile, opted for a “front porch” campaign, staying put at his home in Canton, Ohio, and giving speeches to groups who visited him. McKinley’s strategy was more in keeping with the tradition of the era, and while Bryan was not the first presidential candidate to give speeches across the country in search of support, the level to which he traveled struck some as unseemly, according to Richard J. Ellis and Mark Dedrick in an analysis of presidential campaign activities. They note that John Hay, a Republican, accused Bryan of “begging for the presidency as a tramp might beg for a pie.” But while McKinley won from his front porch against the barnstorming Bryan, presidential candidates who came after acted much more like Bryan than McKinley. Outright electioneering, once a tactic many thought beneath presidential candidates—perhaps born out of the Washingtonian idea that the office seeks the man, as opposed to the other way around—would become both common and something that voters would expect of candidates.19
While the completeness of Nixon’s campaign strategy in 1960 was novel, the general concept—hit as many states as possible—was not. And there were good reasons for candidates to approach presidential elections as national affairs—the best one being that they were just that. Nixon knew that he could not plausibly compete in all 50 states in 1960, but many were extremely close—20 states were decided by less than five percentage points. The same was true in 1976, when Carter defeated Ford by two points nationally (Kennedy won the national vote by less than two-tenths of a point against Nixon).
It stands to reason that there would be a lot of close states in a close
