The 1968 United States presidential election in Mississippi was held on November 5, 1968. Mississippi voters chose seven electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.
During the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement dictated Mississippi's politics, with effectively the entire white population vehemently opposed to federal policies of racial desegregation and black voting rights.[2][3] In 1960, the state had been narrowly captured by a slate of unpledged Democratic electors,[c] but in 1964 universal white opposition to the Civil Rights Act and negligible black voter registration[d] meant that white Mississippians turned almost unanimously to Republican Barry Goldwater (apart from a small number in the northeast of the state opposed to Goldwater's strong fiscal conservatism).[4] Goldwater's support for "constitutional government and local self-rule"[5] meant that the absence from the ballot of "states' rights" parties or unpledged electors was unimportant. The Arizona Senator was one of only six Republicans to vote against the Civil Rights Act,[6] and so the small electorate of Mississippi supported him almost unanimously.
Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal examiners registered Mississippi blacks as voters in large numbers: African American registration rose from under seven percent to over fifty-nine percent between mid-1965 and 1968.[7] Extreme anger ensued among white Mississippians, because black voting in significant numbers would threaten the entire social fabric of the Black Belt[8] and was even feared by the few upcountry whites who had stayed loyal to Johnson.[9] The anger of Mississippi's whites was seen in the 1967 Democratic gubernatorial primary, when both Black Belt whites and their traditional foes in the upcountry supported conservative John Bell Williams against William Winter, whom it was believed was favored by the newly registered black voters, although no politician in the state would yet openly court black support.[10]
In addition, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and resultant abolition of Mississippi's poll tax had allowed large increases in both white and black voter registration,[11] with some of these drives run by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, when segregationist former and future Alabama GovernorGeorge Wallace announced in early 1968 that he would mount a third-party candidacy for the Presidency, he had a powerful base in the Deep South. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, under new RNC Chairman Ray C. Bliss, had of necessity moved away from the strident conservatism of Goldwater.[12]
Given Wallace's reputation on racial issues, it was inevitable that he would be endorsed by Mississippi's established Democratic Party leadership, and this happened in September.[13] William Winter, the losing candidate for Governor the previous year, did support Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, but knew that it would be too risky to actively campaign for him.[14]
By August, it was widely accepted that Wallace would carry Mississippi by a large margin,[15] as apart from a small number of wealthy urban communities he had captured a virtual monopoly of the state's white electorate. Wallace was the only candidate to campaign in the state;[13] Nixon did not campaign in the state at all, and won more than twenty percent of the vote in just five of the state's 82 counties.[16]
83% of white voters supported Wallace, 17% supported Nixon, and 0% supported Humphrey.[17][18][19]
Predictions
The following newspapers gave these predictions about how Mississippi would vote in the 1968 presidential election:
This was the second presidential election in which Richard Nixon came in third place in Mississippi. Humphrey improved upon the support gained by Johnson, but this was entirely due to the huge increases in black voter registration – exit polls and later analysis suggest the national Democratic nominee received less than 3 percent of the white vote.[29] In fact, so marked was the reversal of voting patterns from the previous five presidential elections that Humphrey did worst in the counties where Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson II and Harry S. Truman had run best.[30]
With 63.46 percent of the popular vote, Mississippi would prove to be Wallace's second strongest state in the 1968 election after neighboring Alabama.[31]
^Although he was born in California and he served as a U.S. Senator from California, in 1968 Richard Nixon's official state of residence was New York, because he moved there to practice law after his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. During his first term as president, Nixon re-established his residency in California. Consequently, most reliable reference books list Nixon's home state as New York in the 1968 election and his home state as California in the 1972 (and 1960) election.
^The Independent electors were originally pledged to Vice Presidential candidate S. Marvin Griffin, but they cast their Vice-Presidential ballots for national nominee Curtis LeMay.[1]
^Over the whole of Mississippi it is estimated that at the time of the 1964 presidential election between six and seven percent of the black population was registered to vote, and that about three-quarters of these – totalling twenty-one thousand blacks – actually voted in the 1964 presidential election, giving Lyndon Johnson about 40 percent of his fifty-two thousand statewide votes. However, in most rural counties, black registration was zero before the Voting Rights Act and had been since the Constitution of 1890.
^Because Wallace finished first in Mississippi as a whole and Humphrey was the highest-polling statewide major party nominee in the state as a whole, all margins and percentage margins shown are Humphrey minus Wallace unless otherwise stated.
^ abcdefghijklmnopqIn this county where Nixon ran second ahead of Humphrey, margin given is Nixon vote minus Wallace vote and percentage margin is Nixon percentage minus Wallace percentage.
References
^"General Election November 5, 1968," Mississippi Official and Statistical Register 1968-1972 (Jackson, 1969)
^Crespino, Joseph; In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution, p. 206 ISBN0691122091
^Mitchell, Dennis J.; A New History of Mississippi; p. 453 ISBN1617039764
^Phillips, Kevin P.; The Emerging Republican Majority, pp. 208, 210 ISBN9780691163246
^Katagiri, Yasuhiro; The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States' Rights, p. 203 ISBN1604730080
^Thernstrom, Stephan and Thernstrom, Abigail; America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, p. 151 ISBN1439129096
^Mickey, Robert; Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972, pp. 289-290 ISBN1400838789
^Phillips; The Emerging Republican Majority, p. 253
^Phillips; The Emerging Republican Majority, p. 264
^Dittmer, John; Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, p. 417 ISBN0252065077
^"Who's on Top? Humphrey? Nixon? Wallace? — Here's a Capsule Version of election Outlook Across Nation". Pensacola News Journal. September 23, 1968. p. 8B.
^Lawrence, David (November 4, 1968). "As Editors' Forecast Returns: Nixon 37, Humphrey 7, Wallace 7". Fort Lauderdale News. p. 11A.
^1972 Almanac of American Politics (1972) by Michael Barone, Grant Ujifusa and Douglas Matthews
^Black, Earl (2021). "Competing Responses to the New Southern Politics: Republican and Democratic Southern Strategies, 1964-76". In Reed, John Shelton; Black, Merle (eds.). Perspectives on the American South: An Annual Review of Society, Politics, and Culture. ISBN9781136764882.
^Phillips; The Emerging Republican Majority, pp. 245, 266
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