Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Lace ‘Em Up’s Presidential Election series and I’ll be going over the election of 1956; Dwight Eisenhower is looking for re-election and the Democrats are sending a familar face to challenge Ike once again for highest office in the land.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Upon his decisive victory in 1952, President Dwight Eisenhower has been preoccupied over these last four years as he continued on with the same New Deal policies that were used by his two Democratic predecessors and even created a new agency known today as the Department of Health and Human Services whose main focus can best be summed up by their motto: “Improving the health, safety and well-being of America”.

Eisenhower also helped in leading the way for space research which eventually led to the creation of NASA and he pushed for the construction of the Interstate Highway System while using the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 to get the funds needed for it’s contruction with the highway being a major accomplishment in ifixing the country’s infrastructure.

On foreign policy, Eisenhower was able to sign an agreement that pulled American forces out of the Korean War and his handling of the Suez Canal Crisis was impressive as the president threatened the three countries invading Egypt with economic sanctions if they didn’t cease hostilities and soon afterward the United Nations helped in ending the crisis.

With that said, there was also a dark side to Ike’s foreign policy as he allowed the CIA to overthrow a number of foreign leaders under the belief of the domino theory aka the idea that if Communism was allowed to exist in one part of the world then it would spread in other areas.

Many of these coup d’etats occurred in Guatemala, the Congo, the Dominican Republic and Iran with the latter seeing the CIA aid the British in a plot to overthrow the elected Iranian official, Mohammad Mossadegh who wished to nationalize the country’s oil supply only to be overthrown and replaced by a secular dictator who was friendly to the Western powers….Spoiler alert this incident would come back to haunt the U.S. but more on that when we get to the 1970’s.

Despite the president allowing the CIA to overthrown foreign leaders, Eisenhower was still widley loved by the general public he was easily renominated by the Republican Party with Richard Nixon again as his running mate.

Round Two for Stevenson

The Democrats were now in a situation that hadn’t been familar with for sometime as they now had to find a candidate who could compete against a very popular incumbent Republican President.

Unlike the previous election, only three Democrats went after their party’s nomination:

• Averell Harriman- Governor of New York
• Estes Kefauver- Senator of Tennessee
• Adlai Stevenson – Former Governor of Illinois

Although he was reluctant to become the party’s nominee four years earlier and ended getting trouched by Eisenhower coming election day, Adlai Stevenson decided to go for the presidency again except this time he would be more focused this than being re-elected as Governor.

Despite Harriman getting the endorsement of former President Harry Truman, it became a tight race between Stevenson and Kefauver with the first two primaries being won by the populist Tennessee Senator.

This eventually made way for the first ever live television debate between two candidates of the same party in May of 1956 with Stevenson coming out on top and using that momentum to win the Florida and California primaries before Kefauver decided to drop out of the race.

Upon Stevenson winning the nomination for a second time he decided to make things a lot more interesting by having the delegates choose who his running mate would be in the election.

The two names that got the most attention were Kefauver and a fresh faced Senator from Massachusetts by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy…Yup that John Kennedy.

By the end though most of the delegates switched their support to Kefauver making him Stevenson’s new running mate and the only election in which JFK actually lost.

Campaign Strategies & The Brown V. Board of Education Ruling

Much like the previous election, Stevenson was at a disadvantage almost from the beginning as he was running against not only the same man who beat him a few years earlier but also against very popular president.

In order to have a chance against Eisenhower, he and Kefauver used television ads to get their message for economic improvement and education reforms across while also campaigning on issues like ending the military draft, increase spending on social programs, reducing military spending and ending Eisenhower’s testing of Nuclear weapons.

The ads by the Eisenhower team weren’t as iconic as they were in ’52 but they were still effective which was a good thing for the 60 something year old president as he had suffered a heart attack a year before the election but had thankfully recovered.

The Eisenhower ads talked about the president pulling American troops out of Korea, keeping the country from getting involved in more war and they also centered on a specific demographic that being the women or more specifically housewives as female voters overwhelmingly voted for Ike in the previous election and now these new ads are designed to increase the woman vote for this election. 

In addition to the political ads, Eisenhower was running on his record from both a domestic and foreign policy standpoint with more Americans paying attention to the former than the latter.

Another important thing to mention about this election is that this election came around two years after the Supreme Court’s decision on the case Brown v. Board of Education which paved the way for racial intregation in public schools and Eisenhower came out in support of this ruling.

This led to around 40% of African Americans to support the president even though they still weren’t allowed to vote yet. It should also be noted that this would be the last time a Republican candidate for president would get a large amount of support from the black community going forward.

Election of 1956: The Results

As you probably expected…Dwight Eisenhower easily won re-election and won even more than he did in the previous election.

Eisenhower won 41 states out of 48 this time, including the state of Lousiana which hadn’t voted for the Republicans since 1876 and he increased his vote total a little bit more as he received 457 electoral votes and 57.4% of the popular vote.

Adlai Stevenson finished with just 73 electoral votes and 42% of the popular vote, in terms of both the electoral and popular vote this is the worse performance for a democratic candidate seeking the presidency where only two major candidates ran since Al Smith in the election of 1928.

Strangely enough, one faithless elector in Alabama voted for a segregationist Circuit Court Judge by the name of Walter Burgwyn Jones making this first time since 1872 in which a vote was given to someone who wasn’t running as a third party candidate.

This election would make Dwight Eisenhower the first Republican President to be elected to a second term since William McKinley in 1900 and the first to served two full terms in office since Ulyssess S. Grant.

It’s also worth noting that this would be the last Presidential Election to be an exact rematch of the previous one for almost 70 years until Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off a second timing in the election of 2024.

If you like this kind of content, be sure to leave your thoughts down below in the comment section and be sure to follow Lace ‘Em Up on X @laceemupoffice you can follow me also on X @hakeemfullerton and I’ll see you in the next article.