The recalculations were going on in both parties. Once a basic Democratic belief had been that the party could not afford to alienate the South. Now there was a new calculation. The eleven southern states had a total of 128 electoral votes, and that figure included Texas, which Eisenhower had carried twice and whose twenty-four electoral votes could no longer be considered safe for a Democratic presidential candidate. Without Texas, the South’s electoral vote was 104. The nine key northern states had 223 electoral votes.
