1960 United States presidential election in Hawaii
American election
The 1960 presidential election in Hawaii was held on November 8, 1960, as part of the 1960 United States presidential election. This was the first presidential election in which Hawaii participated; the state had been admitted to the Union just over a year earlier. The islands favored Senator John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, by a narrow margin of 115 votes, or 0.06%, after a court-ordered recount overturned an initial result favoring Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican. The result was considered an upset.
This was one of only two presidential elections since statehood that Hawaii voted more Republican than the national average. The other was 1972, when it voted 0.8% more Republican than the national average, also with Nixon on the GOP ticket. This is also one of only two elections in which Hawaii's counties did not all back the same candidate, the other being 1980, where the winner of each county was of the opposite party as in 1960. Unlike in the 1960 election, Honolulu voting Republican in 1980 was not sufficient to single-handedly carry the state, while all three other counties voted for Jimmy Carter. As of 2024, Hawaii's first presidential election remains the closest in the state's history.
Background
The Hawaii Republican Party was traditionally dominant in the Territory of Hawaii and held a majority in the territorial legislature between 1901 and 1955.
“1960 United States presidential election in Hawaii” enters the record as american election. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what United, States and presidential can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24229372. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1972, 1980 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “1960 United States presidential election in Hawaii” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.