describe a Nixon 1960, Humphrey 1968 voter

[freepcrusher]

there has to be a decent amount of those people judging by election results - despite doing 7% worse than Kennedy, there are places where Humphrey actually over-performed Kennedy (even Massachusetts)

[Sumner 1868]

Do we assume they voted for Johnson in 1964?

[freepcrusher]

Do we assume they voted for Johnson in 1964?

yes

[Sumner 1868]

Do we assume they voted for Johnson in 1964?

yes

Here's some possibilities:

A anti-Catholic Democrat.
A Maine Republican or right-leaning independent.
A black former Republican who became a loyal Democrat in 1964 because of civil rights.

[freepcrusher]

i thought the best description would be of a stereotypical northeast WASP (think John Lindsay, who very well may have gone Nixon 60, Humphrey 68).

[sg0508]

Those who simply didn't care for Richard Nixon and were fatigued by him by '68. 

[Thunderbird is the word]

Jackie Robinson, also maybe a Humphrey loyalist who thought that Kennedyw as an upstart. (The 1960 version of a PUMA.)

[Mr. Smith]

A  swing Washintonian or average Maine voter

[Dr. Cynic]

I would say my grandfather, but he voted for Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey in the 60s, before switching back to Nixon in 72.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

 A moderate GOPer who supports an anti war platform, and thought Nixon was lying about involvement in Vietnam during the 1968 debates.  A Rockefeller voter in perhaps WI.

[SingingAnalyst]

Assuming they voted Johnson in '64, it's quite likely. A Black voter who voted Nixon in 1960 (that's fairly likely even in Detroit where Kennedy won about 84% of the Black vote, but not the 95%-ish that Johnson and Humphrey won in '64 and '68; a liberal or moderate Republican or Independent particularly in New England or the Pacific Northwest. In ME, VT and MA Humphrey improved his percentages over Kennedy 1960, and in some communities (Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, Lexington, Amherst) in MA the improvement was pretty dramatic.

[Thunderbird is the word]

MA was arguably already a fairly solidly Democratic state (albeit not by the margins post 64) at the presidential level beginning in the New Deal era. I think it was only Eisenhower's personal popularity that allowed him to carry the state in 52 and 56.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Demographics had screwed the GOP in MA and RI post Silent Cal, who had appeal to Irish Catholics.

[Mechaman]

MA was arguably already a fairly solidly Democratic state (albeit not by the margins post 64) at the presidential level beginning in the New Deal era. I think it was only Eisenhower's personal popularity that allowed him to carry the state in 52 and 56.

Yeah pretty much.

Hell, Kennedy was actually a pretty good candidate in the New England region in general.  A 60% result in Massachusetts for a Democrat at the time was nothing to scoff at.  Keep in mind that before then the best performance for a Democrat was in 1948 when Truman won something like 53% of the vote.

A lot of that had to do with Kennedy going out of his way to seem likable to many MA Republicans.  He took a page out of the David I. Walsh playbook in that regard, trying to portray himself as an independent minded pragmatist who was willing to put Massachusetts interests first over the New Deal orthodoxy at the time (see his opposition to the TVA when he first entered Congress as an example) which many in the region resented due to the impression that it favored the poorer and more rural South and West over New England interests.  He also was, at first, quite friendly to the isolationist rhetoric.  Even after he got on the Cold Warrior train he was quite critical of US involvement in Indochina, a position that appealed both to dovish Yanks and anti-colonialist ethnic Catholics for a variety of reasons (which is not to ignore that he was sort of a hypocrite on foreign policy, as just two years before that speech he went out of his way to court McCarthyites in his election bid).  He also underwent a pretty unprecedented statewide tour of every city and town in Massachusetts in his 1952 election in order to make him sellable to the state's many non-urban and protestant voters.  That his family's fortune far exceeded Lodge's also helped in both the election (hell, his father practically bought the Boston Post just to prevent them from endorsing Lodge) as well as public perception.
Throughout the 1950s his dad's extreme wealth was used to pretty much get the media to turn his son into a movie star, so much so that his name was floated as a VP candidate in 1956 and Stevenson filmed an infomercial with the young Senator during the 1956 campaign season in order to expand his appeal to foreign policy pragmatists who might be wary about his anti-nuke stance.

And really, going off of what Yankee said, it should be noted that as early as 1928 Smith had been able to win a majority of the vote in Massachusetts.  Sure, a lot of this was tribalistic voting by ethnic Catholics as well as large support from Jews and Eastern European groups, but even as late as 1928 protestants made up a very significant proportion of the state's population.  Socially liberal protestants tended to side with the Democrats post Reconstruction due to concerns about the growth of moralistic governance under their more conservative Puritan descendant cousins.  According to the book "The Irish Americans", a lot of the early successes of Democrats in Boston was due to an alliance between the Irish and "Democratic Yankees" (shocking I know) in protest of the moralistic and overly pro-business Republican dominance of the city.  Later on this relationship would dissipate as the Irish saloon owners and ward bosses gained more and more power as demographics favored them (and the mob helped scare a lot of the old families away).  However, there was still some support among these voters, as results as early as the 1876 Presidential Election will show (Democratic support pre-Bryan far exceeded the non-protestant population of the time).  I suspect that many of these "Democratic Yankees" were Bourbons who sympathized largely with the Cleveland wing of the party.

It is likely that the descendants of those voters, who likely defected for McKinley, Harding, and Coolidge, went back to voting Democratic when Smith ran for president on an as pro-wet of a platform as one could get at the time against a GOP campaign that many considered to be pretty openly anti-Catholic.  Said group also probably played a hand in successfully re-electing David I. Walsh to the Senate (of note, he outperformed Smith by 3 points in 1928 and was elected in a a certifiable landslide over his Republican opponent in 1934 while his counterpart in the Gubernatorial race, infamous ethnic baiter James Curley, won by a more paltry seven points) before and during the Great Depression despite being "not a fan" of the New Deal.  This group might have been somewhat sympathetic to Lodge given Kennedy's entreaties to Taft Republicans, but I suspect that JFK probably won them overwhelmingly in 1958 and then in 1960 when he ran for president.  A guy wins 60% of the vote in 1960s Massachusetts he is probably carrying more than an insignificant amount of the WASP vote in the state.

Looking at his performances in other states in the area, especially Maine and Vermont, I'd actually say that given how close the election was he was a pretty solid candidate in New England and did more good than bad even in many ancestrally Republican areas.  He really helped set the trend in New England on a level more so than it was before and I believe the 1968 result shows that quite well.

As for the question itself, I think it isn't really that hard.  There were many Americans who were impressed with the Eisenhower years and Nixon was running off of that success in 1960.  Swing voters are generally highly receptive to that kind of messaging.  As well, we have to remember that Ike had managed to bring back a lot of black voters momentarily back to the GOP in 1956 due to his pro-Civil Rights stances.  It says on Wikipedia that Kennedy had won 68% of the black vote, and that was only after he became supportive of Martin Luther King Jr..  Point being is that they had less reason to support an Irish Catholic Democrat from the Boston area with a mediocre record on Civil Rights up to that point than a presidential candidate who was one of the architects of getting the Civil Rights plank added to the Democratic platform in 1948 and had fought for Civil Rights legislation every year in the US Senate before it eventually became law against a candidate who embraced a "Southern Strategy" and a "law and order" platform that largely played upon white fears of black rioting and violent crime.

A Black Republican might be the most likely answer here.

[Mechaman]

In regards to "anti-Catholic Democrats",

those were likely southern white protestants who begrudgingly voted for Humphrey due to Yellow Doggery (though judging by the results there likely weren't many).  There were liberal anti-Catholics but they didn't make near as much of an issue of Catholicism as the conservatives ones did and I highly doubt they would view the media defined persona of conservative red baiter Richard M. Nixon as a better alternative to the liberal love affair (Arthur Schlesinger's depiction of JFK borders on homoerotic at times) of the time known as John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Basically, outside the South many voters who were anti-Catholic were conservative Republicans who had been voting that way since the Civil War era and weren't really likely to change ships unless they were just extremely disgusted by Nixon's "Southern Strategy".  Anti-Catholicism was the Anti-Islam of the 19th-early 20th century right wing.  Anti-Semitism was . . . . . . . well, that was practically everybody except socialists and communists until about the post World War II era.

In regards to Maine,

Not really much to be said here except that 1968 had more Muskie in it.