# 1956 Presidential Election [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]'s reelection — a near-rerun of 1952 against Adlai Stevenson. Ike won 457 to 73 electoral votes, 57.4% to 42.0% in the popular vote, an even larger margin than his first victory. The election was conducted against the backdrop of the **Suez Crisis** (October-November 1956) and the **Soviet invasion of Hungary** (November 1956) — both unfolding in the final two weeks of the campaign. Eisenhower's handling of both crises — pressuring Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw from Suez while not intervening militarily in Hungary — became the late-campaign closing case for his reelection. One Alabama elector (W.F. Turner) cast their electoral vote for Walter Burgwyn Jones rather than Stevenson, the last "**faithless elector**" to vote for a non-candidate before the post-2016 wave. ## Result - **[[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]** (Republican) — 457 electoral votes, 57.4% popular - **Adlai Stevenson** (Democrat) — 73 electoral votes, 42.0% popular - Walter Burgwyn Jones (faithless elector vote) — 1 electoral vote (Alabama) - Total: 531 electoral votes ## Right-wing relevance The 1956 election's right-wing relevance is principally as the consolidation of the **Modern Republican** approach at landslide scale — the proof-of-concept that an internationalist, broadly New-Deal-accepting Republican Party could win national elections by 15-point margins. The contemporary movement-conservative narrative treats 1956 as the high-water mark of an era to be transcended; the 1957 William F. Buckley *National Review* essay "Why the South Must Prevail" and the 1958 [[Robert Welch]] / [[John Birch Society]] founding are the early operational signals of the conservative-movement formation that would displace Modern Republicanism by 1964 (Goldwater) and operationally complete the displacement by 1980 (Reagan). ## Connections - [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] — Reelected. - [[Richard Nixon]] — VP; future presidential candidate. ---