JACKSONVILLE, Fla — In 2016, The Florida Times-Union took an in-depth look at the role Jacksonville played in every presidential election since 1948. The Times-Union has updated that story for 2020.
Even as the novel coronavirus has had a muted effect on in-person rallies, the importance of Duval County to winning the presidency has remained apparent, even if it's taken more of a backseat to other must-win regions of the country for Democrats and Republicans alike, like those in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump rallied here in September, drawing a crowd of thousands to the Cecil Airport, where Trump criticized Democrats as "anti-police radicals."
While Joe Biden has not visited, his running mate, Kamala Harris, came to town to kick off early voting, and Biden's wife, Jill, who is a teacher herself, has hosted a Zoom discussion with local teachers and parents.
Rather than running up the score in North Florida, like traditional Republicans, Trump won 2020 largely from his better performance in the Tampa Bay area. Trump’s top three gains over Romney’s results came in Pasco, Pinellas and Volusia counties.
This week, Biden and Trump held dueling events in Tampa on the same day. In October, Vice President Mike Pence canceled a Jacksonville rally and scheduled one in Lakeland instead.
In terms of Northeast Florida, a tie in Duval County "essentially would be a win for Trump," University of North Florida political scientist Michael Binder said.
CNN called Duval the "largest swing county in the largest swing state."
NPR called Duval a "surprise battleground."
For more than a century, Jacksonville votes have helped determine who wins the presidency, even when candidates ignored Duval.
The Times-Union interviewed staffers and volunteers from most campaigns, going back to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The Times-Union relied on newspaper accounts, academic journals and books to reconstruct Jacksonville's influence on each of the campaigns.
Here is where William McKinley became the first candidate to address a Black audience when he sought Black delegates’ support for the 1896 Republican nomination. Here is where Jimmy Carter’s anti-establishment, Baptist handshaking and Ronald Reagan’s positive message, showed that no virtue may be as great for a politician as being an outsider.
To win the election, Trump needs Florida. FiveThirtyEight's model for the election says he has a less than 1 percent chance of winning the presidency without Florida, but his chance of winning jumps to nearly one in three if he wins the state.
Trump has many paths to winning Florida. Like in 2016, he could run up the vote in exurban and suburban counties, like when he won the I-4 corridor, flipping counties that voted for Obama. He could keep the margins closer in the state's biggest counties, making gains with Hispanic voters in places like Miami-Dade, Hillsborough and Orange. He could also win if Black voters in North Florida counties like Duval simply choose to abstain from the election.
Duval is one of the few parts of the state that shifted toward Democrats in 2016 and continued that shift in 2018, even as Democrats lost the state both years.
In 2016, although Trump won the state, he was not able to return Jacksonville to the types of victories George W. Bush earned in 2000 and 2004, by 17 and 16 points.
As the county with the third-most Black residents in the state, Democrats wonder if Biden and Harris can earn the enthusiasm Andrew Gillum did two years ago when he won Duval by more than four points.
But as Gillum proved, Democrats winning Duval while losing votes in Miami-Dade can still lead to a Republican victory.
Since the Civil War, Jacksonville has been home to a significant Black population as well as Southern whites, and since the Civil War, candidates have tried to delicately court both.
As the bedrock of religious conservatives, Trump could mobilize a base of white evangelical volunteers more than Mitt Romney or John McCain could. Can Trump return the Republican Party to the 16- and 17-point margins in Jacksonville that Bush experienced in 2000 and 2004? Or could Biden win as a Democrat in Duval, the first Democratic presidential candidate since Carter in 1976?
Frequently, Democrats and Republicans alike came to Jacksonville to preach of fiscal conservatism, military strength and religious values. In years past, Jacksonville has been a magnet for gaffes. Here, the momentum has changed. And repeatedly, in the last 12 years, candidates came here on the eve of the election.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon visited Hemming Park the same day. Kennedy used Nixon’s speech to attack the Republican for pandering. In 1980, after weeks of struggling, Reagan earned a wave of attention when here he attacked Carter’s defense secretary.
In 1992, George H.W. Bush apologized here for a campaign statement that called Bill Clinton a “sniveling” hypocrite. In 2000, when news broke that George W. Bush once pleaded guilty to driving under the influence, he came here to pray with evangelist Billy Graham.
In 2008, John McCain infamously declared the “fundamentals of our economy are strong,” the same day the Lehman Brothers bank declared bankruptcy. Obama came three times, including the day before the election, to hammer McCain.
As we look forward to Tuesday, when the nation will sit by television and computer screen waiting to learn who will win and who will lose the presidency, let’s look back as well. Perhaps something in Jacksonville’s recent history can tell us what to look for in Duval’s results
2016 ELECTION
Hillary Clinton didn't win Duval, but she surprised many when she kept the county to a one-point margin.
In part, it was surprising because Trump, not Clinton, had spent considerable energy campaigning here, while Clinton largely ignored the area.
Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine, never visited Duval.
A Barack Obama rally at the University of North Florida in the final week drew lines stretching across campus.
Bill Clinton, the former boss of former Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown, visited twice.
While Clinton’s margin of victories in urban counties increased from Barack Obama’s in 2012, Trump dominated in the suburbs, enough to hold onto 49 percent of the vote compared to Clinton's 48 percent.
“Everything I thought I knew about how to win an election, I re-learned,” Susie Wiles, a Jacksonville political consultant who headed Trump’s Florida campaign, said at the time.
Trump earned nearly 93,000 more votes than Clinton in Clay and St. Johns counties, two of his best in the state.
Trump drew thousands of supporters at each of his three 2016 rallies, but it's possible those voters came in from Duval's suburbs. As Duval shifted to the left, its suburbs, already heavily Republican, became even more so.
Winning Duval by a large margin wasn't necessary.
2012 ELECTION
Mitt Romney failed to reach George W. Bush’s earlier Jacksonville momentum.
He could win, his campaign said, if he brought back double-digit margins to Duval.
“We knew they, the Democrats, couldn’t replicate 2008,” said Drew Messer, Romney’s Florida campaign director. The campaign, similar to Barack Obama’s in 2008, decided early on to focus here, but Messer said a brutal primary campaign damaged him too much with the faith-based community. It supported him, but not as enthusiastically as with Bush. “It's why you see Trump have rallies here and in St. Augustine today [Oct. 24].”
In the last week before Election Day, both campaigns blitzed North Florida, though Obama was off the campaign trail dealing with Hurricane Sandy.
Romney’s VP candidate, Paul Ryan, visited Fernandina Beach just 8 days before Election Day. Two days later, Romney came to Metropolitan Park, where he told a packed crowd on a weeknight, “with enough energy like that, I think we’re going to win Florida.”
Michelle Obama came the next day, her third visit that year, alongside Stevie Wonder for a concert at the Prime Osborn Convention Center. Jacksonville had the largest share of Black residents of any city in Florida and President Obama had come within 1.9 percentage points just four years earlier. But Alvin Brown, the city’s first black mayor, refused to campaign for Obama, and initially, Brown wouldn’t even say if he would vote for Obama.
Jacksonville had the largest share of Black residents of any city in Florida and President Obama had come within 1.9 percentage points just four years earlier, but now he faced new problems. Alvin Brown, the city’s highest-ranking Democrat and the first black mayor of Jacksonville who had won office just a year before, refused to campaign for Obama, and initially, Brown wouldn’t even say if he would vote for Obama. (Since then, Brown has acted as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton’s campaign across the country, and he greeted former President Bill Clinton when he came to town.)
In the end, Obama didn’t improve upon his 2008 numbers, losing Duval by 3.6 points, but it was close enough for him to just barely win Florida.
2008 ELECTION
In no other election did candidates fight for Duval’s votes as much as in 2008.
Barack Obama’s campaign made an unprecedented effort for North Florida. Obama’s campaign identified where registered Black voters weren’t voting, and “Duval had the highest potential,” said Steve Schale, Obama’s Florida director and a local native. Schale argued they “could take away one or two of those places Republicans have to win by double-digit margins. … So what if you crush your turnout in Miami-Dade? You can lose Duval and North Florida by enough that they make it up.”
Obama and his wife visited four times, drawing large audiences.
While Sarah Palin drew 7,000, McCain didn’t drum up enthusiasm. His campaign predicted large crowds on a September weekday. Only about 3,000 came. That Tuesday morning, his campaign released an ad saying the economy was in crisis, but with empty and covered seats as a backdrop McCain infamously announced, "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," on the same day that the Lehman Brothers investment bank filed for bankruptcy, the day after Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called the financial crisis a "once-in-a-century type of event."
A week later, Obama drew 25,000 to Metropolitan Park. When he returned on the eve of Election Day, he reminded the crowd of what McCain said, drawing loud boos. “You don’t need to boo,” he said. “You just need to vote.”
Obama’s campaign teamed up with churches, barbershops and beauty salons to find new voters. In 2004, George W. Bush had beat John Kerry in Duval by nearly 62,000 votes, or 16 points. McCain won by only 7,900 votes.
2004 ELECTION
Despite John Kerry’s efforts to improve upon Al Gore’s dismal performance in North Florida, he couldn’t match the overwhelming support Jacksonville gave George W. Bush.
Kerry visited in 2002 and 2003, and then twice in 2004.
“There’s nothing conservative about a Bush administration that runs deficits as far as the eye could see,” he said in May. “We deserve a president who looks Americans in the eye and tells them the truth,” he said in September.
In mid-October, Bush touted his social conservative credentials at the football stadium. His campaign said 53,000 people attended, higher than any other event that year.
The day before, Sen. John Edwards, Kerry’s vice presidential pick, brought out only 2,500 supporters.
Cheney also came that month. And that year, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had its national convention here, where Edwards also spoke.
Democrats hoped to win 44 percent of the vote, matching Clinton in 1996, but their hopes to stop a slide in North Florida failed. In North Florida’s 36 counties, Clinton won 16 in ‘96, Gore won 5, and Kerry won only 4. He only got 42 percent in Duval.
The Republicans said they wanted Bush to win here with 60 percent. Four years earlier, he’d won 57 percent, creating a 44,000-vote margin.
It seemed every Sunday the campaigns sent surrogates to local churches. Al Gore went to two prominent Black churches a week before the election, then the Sunday before the election, Edwards came to another to invoke the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. That day a Bush campaign official went to First Baptist downtown. The next night, Jeb and another Bush brother rallied here.
Ultimately, Kerry gained only a half-percentage point over Gore’s performance, and Bush beat Kerry in Duval by nearly 62,000 votes.
2000 ELECTION
While much of the initial attention in the disputed election of 2000 came to Palm Beach’s butterfly ballot and hanging chads, Duval actually had significantly more votes tossed out.
In Jacksonville, 27,000 ballots — about 62 percent in precincts that voted for Al Gore — were thrown out. The sample ballot told voters to “vote all pages,” but the actual ballot stretched the presidential candidates onto two pages, telling voters to “turn page to continue voting.”
George W. Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes, despite Gore winning the country’s popular vote by a half-million.
Though Duval’s ballots may have tipped the election, Bush earned 44,000 more votes here than Gore, a nearly 17-point advantage.
During the campaign, Gore’s team largely ignored Jacksonville, focusing on South Florida. Bush, John McCain, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and Gore’s wife all visited Jacksonville, but Gore himself only came once to a high school during the primary.
Just two weeks before Election Day, a Bush rally at The Jacksonville Landing drew about 10,000.
Because of how close the election was and how many ballots were thrown out, U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown ramped up voter education in 2002 by means of her own “Quick Picks,” a copy of the ballot with endorsements and instructions on how to vote. After the election, Brown and others sued over the Duval County ballot, saying Gore’s voters were especially disenfranchised in Jacksonville.
1996 ELECTION
Conventional wisdom said Bob Dole should’ve won Florida.
No Democrat had carried the state in 20 years. Republican voter registration was surging. Republicans held the state Senate. Jacksonville elected its first Republican mayor since Reconstruction, and Dole, a World War II veteran, lived in Florida part-time.
Instead, he barely beat Bill Clinton in Duval, and he lost the state.
Two weeks before Election Day, Dole’s Jacksonville Landing rally failed to get the kind of news coverage most rallies there do. The photo op was hurt by 15 or so Hooters’ employees hanging over a railing and by a small plane that interrupted with a U.S. flag and a sign that read, “Don't Export Jobs - Vote Perot.”
That same day, his campaign manager asked the third-party candidate to endorse Dole if the Republican adopted his platform. Perot declined.
Eight years earlier, Dole faced trouble here when he abruptly fired two top aides and left them on a tarmac. During the ‘96 campaign, he again fired two top aides, after losing a primary.
Bill Clinton and Dole each visited Jacksonville the summer of 1995, Dole to talk Social Security, and Clinton to talk about punishing criminals and to congratulate the city for getting the Jaguars. "Don't be discouraged by the rough starts,” he said. “I've had a lot of rough starts in my life."
Rather than running as an outsider, Dole pitched himself as an insider who knows how to work the system.
Pat Buchanan’s primary bid in 1996 struggled with something familiar to Donald Trump this year. Both drew support from white supremacists. The day after Buchanan’s chairman stepped down because he was linked to white supremacists, Buchanan’s organizer in Duval County said while phone-banking for Buchanan she would also ask voters to join a white-supremacist group. Buchanan blamed Dole, accusing him of sending the woman to his campaign.
1992 ELECTION
The 1992 election in Jacksonville in particular foretold how politics could transform lifestyle.
As President George H.W. Bush faced an attack from the right in Pat Buchanan, the spread of right-wing talk radio took hold here. Some restaurants even set aside listening rooms for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, according to a news account.
Democrats feared Black voters might not turn out, and Jacksonville’s chapter of the NAACP began an operation to register voters.
In Jacksonville, Bill Clinton made what The New York Times called “a naked plea for Black votes,” and residents compared him favorably to Jesse Jackson, who four years earlier had energized Black voters when he failed to earn the nomination.
When Ross Perot led in the polls, observers wondered what should happen if the U.S. House must decide the next president. Jacksonville’s representative, Democrat Charlie Bennett, bucked the party and said he would honor the candidate who won his district. Perot faltered, failing to garner an electoral vote, and he did even worse here than across Florida and the nation.
In 90-degree heat in August, Bush arrived at the Jacksonville Landing to chants of “Four More Years” and a glowing introduction from Jacksonville’s Democratic mayor, Ed Austin. “What a fantastic Jacksonville turnout,” Bush said. “This is good for the soul.”
He took a more aggressive stance against Clinton’s proposals, calling the Democrats big-government, high-taxing liberals who would decimate Jacksonville’s military economy and “socialize” medicine.
Yet he also had to criticize one of his top aides for spreading a document that called Clinton a “sniveling” hypocrite and referred to his sex scandals. ”This is not how I want to run the campaign,” Bush said.
On Election Day, voter turnout was so high in the town of Bryceville, 20 miles west of Jacksonville, that election officials ran out of ballots. They had to make copies of sample ballots. And in Jacksonville, 46,000 more voters came to the polls than four years earlier, dropping the share of Bush’s votes but not enough to give Florida to Clinton. Clinton lost the state by just under two percentage points, and he lost Duval by 12.6 points.
1988 ELECTION
In 1988, Jacksonville played a more diminished role in the election, in part because the Democrats nominated a liberal candidate who wasn’t seen as having much of a chance here and in part because Republicans were still riding a wave of electoral victories Ronald Reagan earned the previous two elections.
While Jacksonville wasn’t an important city for Bush’s presidential chances, 1988 was significant for local Republicans
Republican candidates associated local Democrats with their nominee, Michael Dukakis. From Buddy McKay, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, all the way down to state legislative races, campaign ads called Democrats liberals in the mold of Dukakis.
Registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans nearly three-to-one in Duval, so Republicans set up booths in Regency Square Mall to persuade Democrats to switch parties.
Dukakis had picked Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative Democrat from Texas, as his running mate, and both visited Jacksonville with tailored messages.
Dukakis spoke about the need for more military funding than Bush was proposing. But when he arrived, Jacksonville’s mayor, Tommy Hazouri, kept talking as clouds rolled over. “The rain came faster than the speech, I guess,” Hazouri remembered.
When Dukakis finally took over, a rain storm hit, and he threw away his speech, rushing through talking points.
Dukakis hammered conservative points, like his promise to wage an all-out war against drugs, and he berated Ronald Reagan for “credit card economics,” a reference to growing deficits.
Days later, Lloyd Bentsen came and declared it was “Quayle season,” a reference to Republican vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle, who was in a controversy about his National Guard service. “Mike Dukakis served in Korea. Lloyd Bentsen flew (bombing) missions in Europe,” he said. “Mike Dukakis and I both know what it takes to serve in defense of our country and to fight for freedom.”
The day before the election, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham came to Jacksonville, except he never mentioned the unpopular candidate by name. Instead, he praised past popular Democratic presidents, trying unsuccessfully to prevent down-ballot Republicans from throwing out Democrats.
Despite visits from Dukakis, Bentsen and Graham, the Democrats floundered, and Duval overwhelmingly voted for Bush. He beat even Reagan’s margins, winning Duval by 26 points.
1984 ELECTION
In 1984, Florida had lost its status as a swing state. While Walter Mondale relied on votes in Jacksonville to get the Democratic nomination, neither Mondale nor President Ronald Reagan needed to visit Jacksonville during the general election, a sign of how difficult it was to win the South back for progressive Democrats.
More than anyone else, Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist, relied on Jacksonville to mobilize a base of Black voters that would later become essential to Barack Obama. He came to the Bethel Baptist Institutional Church, the city’s oldest Baptist church created back in 1838 and later split and segregated after the Civil War. There he made a sermon-like appeal, asking those in the congregation want to contribute $1,000 to come forward, then $500, $100 and $50. He raised about $9,000, The New York Times reported.
Jackson helped pave the way for Barack Obama, not only by getting Democrats more used to the idea of a Black nominee, but by protesting in Jacksonville the Democrats’ nominating process in ‘84, and eventually securing changes so that no state could be winner-take-all, which he argued was unfair. Obama took advantage of those changes to beat Hillary Clinton in 2008.
There was little competition in 1984 when Reagan beat Mondale nationwide by 18 points, or nearly 17 million votes. In Duval, Reagan did even better, winning 62 percent of the vote. Only George H.W. Bush four years later, Richard Nixon 12 years before and Harry Truman in ‘48 would do better.
1980 ELECTION
The 1980 general election began in earnest in Jacksonville when on the last day of the Republican convention, President Jimmy Carter emerged from a Georgia vacation and came to Jacksonville.
"I'm very proud of Jacksonville," Carter said. "You've always been friends of mine. The first time I ever left Georgia to go into a foreign State, it was to go to Jacksonville and Jacksonville Beach. I did it every year. And it let me see what the outside world was like, and I liked what I saw. And I would guess, when I was 8 or 10 years old, if I hadn't come down here to see how you lived, I might have been satisfied and still been plowing with a mule in Sumter County, Georgia, growing peanuts. So, I thank you for broadening my perspective."
After his speech, Carter answered questions about Ronald Reagan — the first time Carter publicly mentioned Reagan's name. Carter congratulated Reagan and challenged him to debate, saying Reagan's steep tax-cut proposals would worsen the country's inflation.
But polls showed Carter struggling in Florida, and Jacksonville Republicans reveled in the fact that the conservative, the industrial town could once again turn red.
The only way Carter could win, former state Republican Party chairman Bill Taylor told The New York Times, was if enough Black people in Jacksonville came out and voted.
When Reagan first earned the nomination, he had weeks of bad news cycles. Earlier, during the primaries, in January, he said in Jacksonville he didn’t think America should use its influence to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a statement he'd deny making later during a debate. That negative momentum shifted when, in Jacksonville, he attacked Carter’s defense secretary for disclosing information about a stealth bomber program, calling the announcement of the program was a political stunt that could tip off the Kremlin.
That Jacksonville speech captured weeks of news coverage.
Carter also struggled when his farmer brother, Billy, faced investigations over his use of a Jacksonville-based oil company to obtain oil from Libya.
Though Reagan won in a landslide and Florida wasn't even close, he only beat Carter by four points here, the best showing by a Democrat in Jacksonville until Barack Obama in 2008.
1976 ELECTION
Jimmy Carter carried himself like a hometown boy in Jacksonville, hitting the city frequently.
While their primary candidates fought in the New Hampshire primaries, both Gerald Ford and Carter came to Florida, with Carter settling in Jacksonville, trying to win the city back from George Wallace’s segregationist supporters.
“This isn’t Wallace country anymore,” Mike Hightower, one of the Carter leaders here, said at the time. Hightower later became a powerful fundraiser for George W. Bush.
Pat Caddell, Carter’s pollster, found that Jacksonville might be easier to win than expected. Wallace’s voters were “soft,” in his words. They could be persuaded by another anti-establishment Southerner if they played their cards right. Carter would focus on women, Black citizens, Catholics and younger voters.
Caddell attended high school in Jacksonville, and he did his first polling here in the 1960s. Carter also had close friends in Jacksonville, including his roommate from the Naval Academy. He visited five times just before the March 9 primary.
In March of 1975, Ronald Reagan spoke in Jacksonville, calling himself the “John the Baptist” on behalf of the conservative cause. That year, Ford and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat conducted talks in town at a country club. “Jacksonville is a relatively modern city, historically,” Ford told the press, “and certainly a very progressive city in our development of our great country.”
When Rolling Stone magazine profiled Jacksonville, it declared that “everyone in town seems to agree that George Wallace will sweep Jacksonville in the primary.” So it came as a surprise when Carter won Duval and Florida in the primaries, and then again in the general election.
He beat Ford by 31,000 votes, a 62-percentage point shift, the most dramatic in Jacksonville’s electoral history.
1972 ELECTION
The election where racial issues may have been most explicit came in 1972 when busing and school integration were at the fore of the Democratic nomination in Florida. Later that year segregationist George Wallace would be shot and handicapped, but before then, he won Florida’s primary decisively, carrying every county but Miami-Dade.
It was in Jacksonville when Wallace said that unless President Richard Nixon would halt busing by executive order, he would be forced to run.
New York City Mayor John Lindsay switched parties to join the Democratic fracas, and he came here to urge residents to not accept restricted busing but to demand fuller busing.
He stood nearly alone on the issue. Almost every other candidate rejected busing as an answer to segregation, and Gov. Wallace railed against any attempt at integrating schools. Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson spoke about his opposition to busing in Jacksonville, and he even introduced a constitutional amendment to ban it.
Ultimately, though, George McGovern, a liberal from the Midwest who didn’t compete in Jacksonville, earned the nomination, and he didn’t stand a chance against Nixon.
Nixon’s 45-percentage point victory over McGovern in Duval County was the largest of any election here.
1968 ELECTION
The late 1960s saw radical change in Jacksonville. In 1967, voters consolidated the city and county and elected four Black men and women — the first since Reconstruction.
Yet a year later, in 1968, the county voted for Gov. George Wallace, a segregationist, third-party candidate, over Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Republican vice president Richard Nixon.
And it wasn’t for a lack of trying by Humphrey’s campaign.
The day Jacksonville consolidated its governments, on Oct. 1, 1968, Humphrey preached of Democratic virtue and attacked Wallace and racial division. “I am proud to be the first candidate for president in history to visit the largest city in the free world and to stand here on the platform with Hans Tanzler — the largest mayor of the largest city in the free world. The bold new city of the South, … this is what America is all about.”
He directly attacked Wallace, pointing out the regressive tax system, low wages, starved education budget, and inadequate workmen’s compensation in Alabama under Wallace’s regime. He warned that “this strategy of organized hate — if left unanswered and unchecked — can lead America to disaster— just as surely as the radical tactics of the shouters and disrupters.”
Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s pick for vice president, was almost supplanted for the job by Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, a Jacksonville businessman who in 1960 led a Democrats for Nixon campaign before switching parties. Kirk openly talked of wanting to be Nixon’s vice president, and perhaps if he had been the nominee, then he would’ve later become president instead of Gerald Ford.
Agnew acted as a fiery surrogate in Jacksonville. “What we need is not a number two man, but a new man,” Agnew said of former vice president Humphrey. He pounced on Humphrey’s inability to quiet Wallace and the segregationists in his party, calling him a man “who couldn’t unite his own party and can’t unite the country.”
Agnew also made a calculated pitch to Democrats upset with Humphrey, saying a vote for Wallace was a wasted vote. Conservatives who voted for him were giving Humphrey his “last best hope of squeaking through this election.” He also modeled his speech off of Wallace’s proposals. He attacked federal spending, the war on poverty, civil disobedience, unrest in the cities and colleges. He and Nixon adopted Wallace’s language, declaring themselves “law and order” candidates.
“The majority of Americans who go to the polls in November in Florida and in almost every state of the union will cast votes of protest against this administration. But if those votes of protest against this administration are going to be counted against this administration, they will have to be votes for Richard Nixon.”
Wallace won Jacksonville with 36 percent of the vote, Humphrey came in second and Nixon came in third. But Agnew’s messaging helped lay the groundwork for how Nixon, and Republicans, could start to pull away disaffected Democrats.
1964 ELECTION
A week before Election Day, Lyndon Baines Johnson settled into Hemming Park, the last stop on his Florida tour. Yet the crowd brought signs for Sen. Barry Goldwater, and they chanted for Goldwater, too.
Johnson bragged of his "Southern-ness," that he’d be the first elected Southerner since Woodrow Wilson, and he looked past the Goldwater supporters to Black attendees and said, “We are all equal on Election Day.”
Some estimates said as many as 40,000 people packed Hemming Park. The crowd marched over shrubbery and knocked off lawn sprinklers, a report said, doing $962 worth of damage. Later, garden clubs protested. Another candidate wouldn’t draw as large a crowd again until George W. Bush in 2004.
“A great American party has fallen into the hands of a narrow and an extreme group,” Johnson said of Goldwater and the Republicans. “They ask you to tear down the past. They ask you to take unnecessary risks with your future. There is now, in my judgment, only one course: We must Tuesday go to the polls and crush this threat to American life.”
He closed by asking Goldwater’s fans to “know we have no fear in our hearts and no hate in our souls.”
He shook so many hands that an Associated Press reporter said he left Jacksonville with a bleeding right hand.
It wasn’t Johnson’s only visit to Jacksonville. He also had the opportunity to appear presidential when he came here to assess damage from Hurricane Dora. And he flew into Jacksonville for the groundbreaking of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal.
But ultimately, civil rights loomed largely, and Johnson’s proposals were unpopular.
Though Johnson had one of the largest electoral victories in American history, in Jacksonville, Goldwater beat Johnson by 1,710 votes or 1 percentage point.
1960 ELECTION
One day weeks before Election Day, Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy came to Hemming Park, just hours apart, each drawing massive crowds.
Kennedy followed Nixon and blasted him for pandering. Because Jacksonville had so many Democratic elected leaders, Kennedy tried to hitch himself to them.
Nixon drew some 20,000 people, called one of the largest crowds in the park’s history, only to be surpassed hours later by Kennedy’s estimated 26,000 fans.
Jacksonville’s Democratic mayor, Haydon Burns, drove around with a Democrats for Nixon sign, and Jacksonville businessman Claude Kirk, who would later switch parties and become governor, also led the Democrats for Nixon group.
The week before, vice presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson was greeted by a crowd of 3,000 people, and his Stetson hat, a campaign feature of his, was swiped. A Florida Air National Guard jet flew from Jacksonville to Tampa to deliver a new one.
Like many American cities, Jacksonville was reeling from terrorist attacks, including bombings at a synagogue and at James Weldon Johnson Elementary School, an all-Black school, in April 1958.
And on Aug. 27, 1960, just over two months before the election, Black residents protested for their civil rights by sitting at a whites-only lunch counter, only to be spat upon and beaten by baseball bats and ax handles. The day became known as Ax Handle Saturday.
With that backdrop of civil rights protests, Sen. Barry Goldwater visited Oct. 3, 1960, to stump for Nixon. He said he was encouraged by Republicans’ chances in re-gaining the South, and then he emphasized his concern with the federal government interfering in education, a possible reference to desegregation. “The federal government,” he said, “has no right to educate children. The family has an obligation to educate the children through local school boards and local taxes.” Four years later, facing off against Lyndon B. Johnson, Goldwater would say those words didn’t accurately describe his position.
Though Nixon beat Kennedy in Florida, Kennedy won Duval County by 8.5 percentage points.
1956 ELECTION
The election of 1956 brought a re-match of Adlai Stevenson, a former Illinois governor, and President Dwight Eisenhower.
Unlike in ‘52, Stevenson had to fight for his party’s nomination. Because Florida had the only primary in the South, he made multiple trips here, having to address his support of civil rights in light of a gaffe by a former Florida governor who wrongly said he opposed integration.
Though Jacksonville was difficult territory — its mayor, Haydon Burns, had endorsed his primary rival — he made a TV appearance and drove around the area shaking hands. In May, he went on a local TV program and defended his record as a governor who increased retirement pensions but couldn’t get a Republican legislature to finance them.
Though Florida gave Eisenhower a 99,000-vote majority in 1952, Florida’s governor and senators gave their full support to Stevenson.
Weeks before Election Day, a Democratic representative leaked that Eisenhower intended to use force against schools refusing to integrate. Eisenhower responded by campaigning through the South, stopping in Jacksonville and Miami. While Eisenhower was at Jacksonville’s tarmac, news broke of the Suez Crisis, Egypt’s invasion of Israel. “We must be concerned about the peace of the world,” he said.
His lead against Stevenson grew. This time, he beat Stevenson in Duval, the first Republican since 1928 to do so, and he won by a massive margin statewide.
1952 ELECTION
Dwight Eisenhower bucked traditional Republican campaigns and aggressively sought the South’s votes.
He went on a tour through Atlanta, Jacksonville and Miami that worried Democrats. Here, he said Southern voters were “taken for granted” by Democrats, and Jacksonville should resent that.
Some 15,000 people came to his Hemming Park rally, police said. Hundreds more hung from windows and ledges. In Atlanta, officials estimated 100,000 people lined the streets.
He was described by Herbert Bayer, the political editor of The Florida Times-Union as "the first Republican presidential candidate in history to conduct a full-scale campaign deep in Dixie."
A Florida Democratic committeeman from Jacksonville made national news when he criticized Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson for “veering further and further to the left.”
Because Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson didn’t compete in the primaries, he’d never visited Jacksonville. His vice presidential pick, John Sparkman, came to town and told the crowd there was no reason to suspect a Democratic state like Florida would turn to Eisenhower.
He was wrong. Though Stevenson barely held onto Duval County, Eisenhower won the state, the first Republican since 1928 to do so.
1948 ELECTION
Republicans hoped to make Florida competitive for the first time in decades thanks to a third-party challenge from segregationist Democrat Strom Thurmond who promised to fight the establishment “as long as it is necessary to restore the Democratic Party to the American way and to guarantee that the principle of state sovereignty is perpetuated.”
In Jacksonville, prominent Republicans stumped for New York Gov. Thomas Dewey and even told disaffected Democrats if they couldn’t vote Dewey to vote Thurmond instead.
The last time a Republican won the state was when Al Smith, the Catholic governor of New York, was the Democratic nominee and faced anti-Catholic discrimination.
Thurmond challenged Truman, adopting the mantle of the Dixiecrat States’ Rights Party, because he said Truman Democrats were assaulting people with civil rights. In Jacksonville, he called Truman’s civil-rights stance a “tyranny of centralized government.”
Across the country, the Progressive Party, headed up by former Vice President Henry Wallace, also picked up steam. But not so here.
When vice-presidential candidate Sen. Glen Taylor came to Hemming Park, demonstrators shouted for him to go home to Idaho. As the crowd continued interrupting him, the company providing his loudspeaker turned the equipment off. While singing “God Bless America, some Jacksonville natives threw eggs, and one splattered his hair. One rock was hurled. He and Wallace, he told the crowd, were the best bet for peace with Russia. “I’m in favor of catching spies,” he told the crowd. “But I will not rest until the Un-American Activities Committee is a thing of the past.” At that point, a policeman had to escort him away from the crowds to his car.
Truman was fortunate. Despite two strong third-party pushes that took away Democratic votes, he won each of the three most competitive states, California, Illinois and Ohio, by less than a percentage point.
And in Florida, he dominated, earning 49 percent of the vote, about 15 points more than Dewey’s 34 percent.