THAT CLOUDED KENNEDY MANDATE

...As among Protestants, furthermore, the fundamental division of party loyalties among Catholics remained quite stable over this period: Catholics normally cast a strong Democratic vote, approaching a two to one ratio...

...If, as the candidates suggested, religion should not have been at issue, then Kennedy's mandate cannot be judged by the vote alone...

...After having split their votes almost evenly in the Eisenhower elections, Catholics gave Kennedy an eighty to twenty endorsement...

...A second misconception about the election has grown up among observers well aware of the underlying Democratic majority...

...However, interview materials drawn from the same voters since 1956 contest this interpretation...

...Thus the mandate expressed in November has itself come into question...

...It is natural to compare Kennedy's 1960 triumph with the 1956 Presidential vote...

...The vote proportion which he achieved was the strongest nationwide Republican vote since 1928...

...Translation of these figures to the framework of the full national vote shows that the overall effect of religious feeling in 1960 was a net loss to Kennedy of two to three per cent of the popular votes cast, although it must be remembered that these losses centered in the South...

...The latter fact came as a cold shock to Protestants and, standing alone, left many Protestant Democrats intending to cast an indignant vote for Nixon...

...When there are no unusual circumstances creating transient tides against them, the Democrats can normally expect to win national elections...

...It was, moreover, a personal victory: other Republicans on the same ticket in 1956 did less well across the nation than Richard Nixon in 1960...

...The new currents in 1960 had to do with the Kennedy-Nixon duel itself...

...Kennedy's personal wealth, on the other hand, drew some fire, leading to invidious comparisons with Nixon's background as a "self-made man...

...Kennedy received comparable support as a bearer of the Democratic label...

...If the 1956 election were to be taken as a baseline in estimating the size of this bonus, it would appear enormous...

...The fact that it was largely a new set of Democrats who defected in 1960 is in itself ample evidence that the motives shaping the 1960 vote were quite independent of those aroused by the Eisenhower candidacy...

...But with no more than raw voting statistics in hand, the actual net effect of religion in 1960 has remained disputable...

...The more normal victories registered by other Democrats indicate that there was no general public indignation about the behavior of the Democratic Party as a whole such as colored the 1952 election...

...Those attending church "seldom" defected at a rate of about fifteen per cent...

...This survey makes it possible to specify, in terms of past political behavior, how the Kennedy-Nixon standoff arose, and hence to shed light on other unresolved questions about the policy significance of the 1960 election...

...While some of the praise reserved for Nixon's experience may have hidden a concern over Kennedy's age, the majority of direct references to his age were positive, expressing a desire for "new blood" at top levels of government...

...The debates were widely viewed: Among those citizens who were later to cast a vote, almost eighty-five per cent reported having watched at least one of the programs...

...There is tentative evidence that strong initial anti-Catholic reaction among Protestants lost some of its fury as the campaign progressed...

...In terms of enduring psychological attachments, there was the same clear Democratic majority in the land in 1960 that there had been in 1952...

...Therefore, while the Kennedy figure of eighty per cent represented a handsome bonus and one utterly necessary for his victory, his gains from Catholics were hardly as overwhelming as they appear if the 1956 Presidential vote is taken In some strange sense as a "normal" Catholic response...

...Disgruntled Protestant Democrats and Independents appear to have shifted enough votes away from Kennedy on religious grounds to account for somewhat less than four per cent of the total vote cast outside the South...

...If religion is accepted at face value as a criterion for Presidential choice, it is clear that all of the data have been in since November, and the mandate accorded Kennedy by the public scarcely deserves the name...

...Nixon's primary liability, as registered in voter evaluations, was the simple fact that he was a Republican...

...If this were true, then the mandate granted Kennedy would become murkier still, for both candidates agreed that religion should play no part in the voters' decision...

...It was undoubtedly during these performances that many Protestant Democrats decided that Kennedy was other things as well as a Catholic...

...First, however, any balance sheet must take account of the fact that some of the Kennedy losses were being recouped by a bonus of unusual Catholic votes...

...The net effect of religion outside the South was nearly a stalemate, although Kennedy did enjoy a slight net advantage in the interchange...

...Almost forty per cent of all Protestant Democrats in the habit of attending church regularly crossed party lines to vote for Nixon in 1960...

...This is a figure not greatly below the average Presidential majority in elections over the years...

...Yet the 1956 baseline is thoroughly misleading...

...But the Kennedy image in particular had unique elements which went beyond party stereotypes...

...On the other hand, the kind of popular confidence which Nixon commanded in foreign affairs was entrusted to Kennedy where domestic social and economic problems were concerned...

...Perhaps the best account of this process points to the kind of information held by Protestant Democrats at different stages in the campaign...

...Within the smaller Southern vote, his gains among the rare Catholics must be accounted as negligible, amounting to less than one per cent of the votes cast...

...For purposes of future political strategy, the answer to this question is important...

...By all odds, however, the dominant item in the Kennedy image for the average voter was his Catholicism, and most reactions expressed were thoroughly negative...

...It seems fair to assume that these unusual deviations, so clearly correlated with Protestant church attendance, reflect the religious factor in 1960, since they are patterns unfamiliar to us from earlier elections...

...clear, what was the net effect of these cross-currents...

...Voter interviews suggest that Eisenhower's personal appeal did not rub off on Nixon any more effectively than it had on the Republican Party as a whole...

...Without any prompting on the subject, this most clamorous of silent issues was injected into the interview by nearly forty per cent of the respondents in the national sample, Catholics included...

...Moreover, it is undoubtedly true that the television debates played a role in these attitude changes during the campaign...

...The fact that anti-Catholic indignation became modified in the course of the campaign should not, however, make us lose sight of its substantial impress upon the final vote...

...Only about six per cent of those nominal Protestants who never attend church defected, and this low figure is roughly what may be expected in any election...

...Similarly, Kennedy's youthfulness seemed more of an asset than a liability...

...These expressions of hostility on religious grounds reached their crescendo among just those Protestant Democrats, many of them erstwhile Stevenson supporters, who decided in 1960 to switch to Nixon...

...He was spared such a catastrophe by support from a sizeable new stream of Democratic defectors, people who had voted for Stevenson in 1956...

...It was often assumed during the campaign, for example, that Nixon's hopes for victory depended upon the number of Eisenhower Democrats he could keep in the Republican column...

...He is co-author of the book, "The American Voter," an analysis of political attitudes and motivations of United States voters since 1948...

...People who watched the debates were more likely to have changed their vote intentions during the campaign than were the minority who did not see any of the programs...

...First, we should dispose of two common misconceptions...

...This is a point of first importance...

...Here again, Kennedy had tuned his campaign to play on the strengths of his party...

...Nixon did retain some of the 1956 Eisenhower Democrats, but remarkably few...

...Furthermore, Eisenhower's astonishing personal popularity failed to affect the underlying party loyalties of the electorate...

...Not all of the profit went to Kennedy: There were some Democrats who had planned to vote for Kennedy but thought Nixon did a better job in these face-to-face contests and ended voting for him...

...This theme blended smoothly with the general public's greater confidence in Republican management of foreign affairs, stemming from several war experiences under Democratic Administrations...

...Nonetheless, the difference has been enough to prompt inquiry...

...Ironically, some of these people indicated that aside from religion they considered Kennedy the better candidate, but they could not bring themselves to vote for a Catholic...

...With the imprint of religion PHILIP E. CONVERSE is a study director of the Political Behavior Program at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan...

...Although only a small portion of the public considers itself to be "Independent," with no party leanings whatsoever, it should be noted that the same pattern emerges in this "Independent vote": Regular church-going Protestant Independents voted more than four to one for Nixon, with the Republican vote sloping off to a rough fifty-fifty among the most nominal Protestants...

...Among those who attend church "often," the figure was closer to thirty per cent...

...Indeed, if the only Democratic votes won by Nixon had been those retained from the Eisenhower majority, he would have gone down to a stinging fifty-four to forty-six defeat...

...At the same time, he was losing more than fifteen per cent of the Southern popular vote in defections to Nixon among normally Democratic voters who were at the same time faithful Protestants...

...Yet Catholic Democrats, like Protestant Democrats, had defected to Eisenhower in 1956 at about a twenty-five per cent rate...

...Was Kennedy a relatively unattractive Democrat, or was Richard Nixon a relatively attractive Republican...

...the signs in Congress and elsewhere indicate caution lights along the road to the New Frontier...

...A more intensive study conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, in which a national sample of the electorate that had first been interviewed in connection with the 1956 Presidential election was revisited in 1958 and 1960, has now yielded a more detailed picture of the currents of opinion which shaped the 1960 outcome...

...Where Catholics were concentrated, Kennedy did well relative to recent voting patterns...

...Against such a baseline, we might say that Kennedy drew a relatively strong Democratic vote, some eight per cent more of the two-party vote division than Adlai Stevenson had captured...

...In August and September the large masses of uninformed voters knew little about Kennedy save that he was the Democratic nominee and a Catholic...

...Yet to a surprising degree, the public images of Kennedy and Nixon as candidates flowed from common stereotypes of their respective parties...

...Since almost all of this Catholic vote lies outside the South, it is interesting to consider the South as a case apart in arriving at a summary of Kennedy's gains and losses on the religious issue...

...Predominant opinion has been that Kennedy gained more than he lost as a result of his faith...

...The significance of the Kennedy mandate must depend in the final analysis, then, upon judgments as to the status of the religious issue...

...If we divide Protestant Democrats according to their reported regularity of church attendance, we find that defections to Nixon were most numerous among the most faithful Protestants...

...It is likely that some of the less ardent anti-Catholics gradually found reason to stomach their displeasure and vote Democratic after all...

...One Protestant Democrat who had stated a preference for Nixon because of his greater experience in foreign affairs was later asked if her attitude toward Nixon had ever changed...

...Eisenhower's second landslide victory was fashioned when one-quarter of the voters who were normally Democratic crossed party lines to support him...

...where Catholics were largely absent, as in the South, he lost ground...

...Had the images of the two candidates been arrested here, the 1960 Presidential vote would have approached a straight party contest, with Kennedy taking a comfortable victory...

...But it was at least a "dull-normal" victory, and hardly the creature of fortune that it appeared on the surface...

...He was not only a Catholic, but vigorous, intelligent, and personally charming...

...The progress of the campaign, however, served to fill in other parts of the Kennedy image...

...In these terms, then, it is less to the point to ask why Kennedy made such handsome gains over Stevenson's record in 1956 than to ask why he failed to match "normal" Democratic expectations...

...By actual count, negative references to Kennedy's faith were far more numerous than any other single evaluative theme—policy, party, or personal—concerning Kennedy as a candidate...

...The 1960 Presidential vote division, lower than that which the Democrats might normally expect, represented little carry-over from the 1952 and 1956 Presidential campaigns...

...Save for religion, then, it seems that Kennedy might have won a comfortable fifty-two to fifty-three per cent of the popular vote...

...Such was the power of the religious question in 1960...

...Nixon's forte in the public eye was the "experience" theme, supported by memories of his foreign tours...

...He directed the Center's study of the Presidential election last fall...

...The first voting statistics made it clear that in many parts of the country Kennedy failed to keep pace with other Democratic candidates on state tickets, although the lag was smaller than that suffered by Adlai Stevenson in 1956...

...However, it is easy to be misled by crude vote statistics as to who these defecting Democrats were...

...But it is clear that the majority of the public judged Kennedy to have "won" the debates...

...But the election was a "cliff-hanger," with a vote spread between the two candidates as negligible as any in American history...

...The fact remains, however, that it did...

...They give a useful estimate of Kennedy's anti-Catholic losses among Democrats and Independents...

...That Kennedy drew only half of the popular vote means that once again in 1960 more Democrats than Republicans defected from their normal party...

...When Nixon lost, it was concluded that he had narrowly failed to retain enough of them...

...There is reason, furthermore, to suppose that not everyone concerned about the matter spoke freely about it...

...The public was notably impressed, for example, by Kennedy's quick intelligence, a trait which drew more favorable comment than Stevenson's obvious intellectual qualifications had inspired in earlier years...

...An unusually large proportion of these voters expressed the feeling that they were voting less for Nixon than against Kennedy...

...It is as well a figure which approaches what must be considered "normal" Democratic expectations in the current period...

...She replied that she had formerly disliked Nixon but started to look for something good about him after the Democrats nominated a Catholic...

...In other cases it seems the religious problem forced normal Democrats to cast about for a positive image of Nixon...

...In 1958, a year when short-term political tides were mildly favoring the Democrats, the Catholic Congressional vote went well over seventy per cent Democratic...

...Meanwhile, Kennedy was gaining more than five per cent of this non-Southern vote as a premium beyond normal expectations from Catholics...

...Further study of the November vote tallies has convinced most observers that religion played an important role in the outcome...

...Even with religion aside, it was by no means a strong endorsement, as these things go...

...Whatever else may be said of the national endorsement of Kennedy, it lacked enthusiasm...