Posted on 10/29/2020 7:29:02 AM PDT by Hojczyk
Sixty years ago today, with a presidential election looming, John F. Kennedy embarked on a brutal, 18-hour campaign tour of eastern Pennsylvania. The state, then possessing 32 Electoral College votes, was crucial for Kennedy to win against Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee. In the industrial cities and towns that Kennedy’s campaign targeted, it was an exuberant season—and would prove more so after his subsequent victory, especially for those Catholics who viewed the Democratic candidate’s triumph as a kind of cultural enfranchisement.
Decades later, in 2016, descendants of those Kennedy supporters were pivotal to Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania victory. As it happens, they reside in the same areas—the anthracite coal region and Lehigh Valley—that were the keystone to Kennedy’s win. Next Tuesday, these voters—battered by a pandemic, divided by tumult—will decide if Trump wins a second term, or if Joe Biden becomes America’s second Catholic president. As Election Day nears, revisiting that Friday in late October 1960 makes for a rendezvous with Pennsylvania’s electoral past—one that helps explain the state’s important role in 2020.
On November 3, Pennsylvanians will determine which candidate gets their state’s 20 Electoral College votes. In 2020, as in 2016 and in 1960, the state will largely determine the election’s outcome. This is especially true in communities throughout the Lehigh Valley and the coal region, where yesterday’s Kennedy Democrats are today’s Trump Republicans. Who will they pick—Biden, who looks to claim the Kennedy mantle, or Trump, who hastened a working-class shift against the Democratic Party?
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Let’s never forget that Kennedy “won” thanks to massive fraud in Illinois and Louisiana.
32 to 20 is quite a drop
This is one PA voter that just got tickets to see Trump in Reading PA this Saturday @ 4pm!!!!
KAG2020
Look at the populations of Pittsburgh, Scranton, Wilkes-barre, Altoona, Johnstown & Philadelphia circa 1960 vs. NOW. At one time they were all thriving industrial towns. Now they are all shells.
My thought exactly.
The PA diaspora of the 60’s & 70’s was a major factor in they lives of many as far away as CA. I was born in San Diego (’62); my wife 3 years later in Pittsburgh. She lived in SD from the time she was 3 until I got her in ‘92.
Yep, thanks to Papa Joe’s buddies, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante.
Pennsylvania May have been important to Kennedy, but it was Illinois and more specifically Cook County/Chicago that put him over the top, Thanks to votes manufactured by Richard Daley.
Louisiana wasn’t all that close.
Nixon would have needed to flip more than IL to win outright.
HI-IL-MO-NM-NJ (all less than 1%) - in fact Nixon was declared the winner of HI only for some Kennedy votes to appear at the last minute.
NV-DE-SC all less than 10k votes.
Flipping just HI-IL-MO would have sent the election to the House unless the Independent Democrats who voted for Harry Byrd voted for Nixon in the EC.
And Sam Giancana.
I had heard of IL (Daly) manufacturing votes for Kennedy, and I knew WV created some too.
Had not heard about fraud elsewhere.
Yes they are all down here in Dixie now or Arizona
Thanks RACPE.
“At one time they were all thriving industrial towns. Now they are all shells.”
It’s what happens when you have a bipartisan political class that couldn’t care less about what once was known as the arsenal of democracy.
And a business class that worships at the altar of global free trade and regards “national interest” as a joke and a heresy.
That crowd regards the dismantling and offshoring of American manufacturing as meaningless.
There’s not another country on earth as shortsighted as this one has become. Trump is an anomaly, a throwback to when fools and knaves didn’t run the show.
I agree nearly 100%. But who ELECTED those people to power?? The American public did. And there was for decades no pushback at all.
People needed to make these issues a political must to get elected years ago. Trump has shifted the landscape and hopefully from now on we can either change the party or create a new one that does represent it.
Pennsylvania’s population has grown by 1.5 million since 1960. It has not declined, it’s just that other states have grown larger.
Philadelphia is not a shell. It is a major business hub and it’s metro area has never ceased growing. The city is growing again now too.
Pennsylvania still ranks high in industrial output.
More like Illinois and Texas.
Heavy and Medium industry are pretty much gone. It’s a smattering of light industry and services. Pittsburgh is a finance and research hub, not a steelmaker. Philly was an arsenal during WW2 and a leader in tool & die making. There aren’t many left. That’s the industry that I began working in in ‘79. A few are left but they really don’t make dies & molds any longer because there aren’t enough metal stampers or plastic injection molding houses left to buy them.
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