Election of 1968: Nixon over Humphrey..... (war, general, sixties, Washington)
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Do you agree with this theory as to why that election was close........
Young folk, protesting for civil rights and against the war, tried to get their voice heard at the Convention. Those young folk ended up catching a beatdown in Chicago! Young people, in response, were discouraged and decided to stay home!
I remember one of the Chicago 8 saying many years later, "If I had to do it all over again, I would've voted!" The country got Nixon, and subsequently got Watergate! Whether Humphrey would've been as effective in a divided nation, who knows?
Do you agree with this theory as to why that election was close........
Young folk, protesting for civil rights and against the war, tried to get their voice heard at the Convention. Those young folk ended up catching a beatdown in Chicago! Young people, in response, were discouraged and decided to stay home!
I remember one of the Chicago 8 saying many years later, "If I had to do it all over again, I would've voted!" The country got Nixon, and subsequently got Watergate! Whether Humphrey would've been as effective in a divided nation, who knows?
I think the election was a resounding mandate against Johnson and the Democratic Party over Vietnam and the passage of civil rights legislation. The Democratic Convention hurt Humphrey since he had to win nomination at the late August convention among a divided party. The publicity over the riots outside the Convention swayed public opinion against the Democratic Party.
After receiving the nomination, Humphrey trailed Nixon by double digits in the polls and only had two months to campaign. Close defeats in California, Ohio, and Illinois proved to be Humphrey's downfall in the election.
If memory serves me correctly the gap between them was rapidly closing. I myself was 26 and disgusted with what happened in Chicago. More important I did not like was happening in Vietnam. I was one of many US Veterans that wanted the US out of Vietnam. Humphrey would not distance himself from Johnson on Vietnam. Out of frustration, I almost voted for Nixon but when push came to shove I did not trust him and the Democratic Party was more in line with my beliefs. I literally changed my mind when it cam time to pull the lever. I pulled for HH.
Many said had the election been a week later HH would have won.
I have split tickets for many offices but never for President. I have always voted Democratic for President.
It was not just in response to the convention violence, young people sat out the election because both candidates appeared to be representing the old guard. Senators Kennedy and McCarthy had been their champions and now neither was running. There seemed little to choose from between the Hump and the Dick. Neither was promising to stop the war which was the issue of the election, so what was the point in selecting one or the other?
Although Humphrey may have had more in common with the younger generation than did Nixon, Humphrey was perceived as the man who stole the nomination from the peace candidate, and therefore perceived as a hawk. Humphrey than tried to run a balancing act where he was both against the war for the sake of the young voters, but for the war in order to remain in good standing with the old guard and LBJ. If Humphrey had run as anti war, that would have been a repudiation of LBJ and all the Democrat support and money which he controlled, the labor unions were not against the war at that point. The consequence was that nobody had much of an idea of what the Hump planned to do about Vietnam, if anything.
The other choice was that cheap little hustler Nixon with his supposed "secret plan" to end the war...which turned out to be four more years of bloodshed followed by an announcement of victory before cutting and running.
Do you agree with this theory as to why that election was close........
Young folk, protesting for civil rights and against the war, tried to get their voice heard at the Convention. Those young folk ended up catching a beatdown in Chicago! Young people, in response, were discouraged and decided to stay home!
I remember one of the Chicago 8 saying many years later, "If I had to do it all over again, I would've voted!" The country got Nixon, and subsequently got Watergate! Whether Humphrey would've been as effective in a divided nation, who knows?
The data does not support the notion that there was a significant drop in turnout among young voters in the 1968 Presidential election (see page 2 of the link below). http://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-573.pdf
Further, the election was not close. Nixon won 301 votes in the Electoral College, a surplus of 31 over the 270 required to win the election outright, and 110 more than Humphrey. The five states won by Wallace - AL, AR, GA, LA, MS - would almost certainly have gone for Nixon otherwise. The GOP nominee has swept those five states in 7 of the 11 Presidential elections since then, and the Democratic nominee has only managed to win one or more four times (all 5 states in 1976; GA in 1980; AR, GA, LA in 1992; AR, LA in 1996 - all instances in which the Democrat was from one of those states). Recall that even in the epic Democratic landslide of 1964, Goldwater still carried four of those five states.
A glance at the closest states that Nixon carried does not suggest that there were enough Electoral College votes to be gained by a better youth turnout. Humphrey might've flipped Missouri, but that wouldn't have given him the election. To flip the next two states (NJ and OH, each won by Nixon by a margin exceeding 2%) would not have been possible with only a boost in the youngest voting demographic.
Alternately, an overall boost in the Democratic turnout might've done the job, had Humphrey been better able to unit the base (the youth, intellectuals, Catholics, blacks, the anti-war middle-class). An outright win would have been very difficult (Humphrey would need to find 79 Electoral College votes to get to 270), but if he had just been able to deny Nixon from getting to the 270-threshold, the election would have gone to the House of Representatives in January, where the Democrats controlled 26 of 50 delegations (the minimum number required to select a President) after the 1968 House elections. However, some of those delegations were in the South, and they might've refused to support Humphrey - the result may have been a stalemate, with the consequence that whoever the Senate selected as a Vice President (almost certainly Ed Muskie, Humphrey's running mate) would have upon being sworn in as Vice President immediately ascended to the vacant Presidency.
Simply put, the Wallace candidacy and the popular vote gave the illusion that the election was close. But it really wasn't - Humphrey was a lot further from a victory than it appears.
The real reason the democrats lost the election in 1968 had less to do with Vietnam than it did with the party's support of civil rights for African Americans. The period between 1964 and 1968, saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The GOP began to see the opportunity that was available to pick up votes among unhappy white voters in the South and it slowly undertook a strategy to do so. George Wallace was the third candidate in the Humphrey/Nixon race and as Governor of Alabama he shrewdly appealed to a section of the population in these states that was opposed to civil rights. In fact, the electoral votes that Wallace got were all from the deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas as one poster pointed out. However, Nixon carried places like Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.
Richard Nixon campaigned on a number of themes. However, one of those themes was "law and order". The period between 1964 and 1968 had seen race riots in places like Detroit and New York. T.V. news often portrayed pictures of black people looting and burning buildings. Crime, in general, underwent a considerable increase between 1964 and 1968. However, many people who evaluated Nixon's theme of "law and order" perceived it as a veiled attempt at racism. The "crime" Nixon was speaking of were the race riots that were captured on t.v. The "order" that he perceived were the police and national guard troops using clubs and guns to suppress this largely black population. Many people did perceive that disintegration in the social fabric of the country was occurring. However, many also viewed this in racial terms. The situation wasn't helped by certain black militants like H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldredge Cleaver advocating extreme solutions to the problems of racism in this country. I suspected these people gained more votes for Nixon and Wallace than anyone could imagine.
The final tally of popular vote after this election was 42.7 percent of the popular vote for Humphrey, 43.4 percent for Nixon, and about 12% for Wallace. Nixon won under 1,000,000 votes more than Humphrey. The untold story was the fact that Humphrey came from a point where he was 20 points behind Nixon and almost won the election. The tide was definitely shifting in Humphrey's favor by election day and many political scientists believe if the campaign had lasted a week longer, Humphrey would have been victorious. Of course, "victorious" would simply mean he got more votes than the other two candidates in a three way race. Also, one should remember that just four years before, LBJ had won the election with about 61% of the vote. A drop to 42.7% meant a huge "sea-change" in the way many people felt.
The age of voters had little to do with Humphrey's defeat. He was caught up in bad circumstances. The civil rights laws had done much good. However, the combination of the civil rights laws and opposition to the Vietnam War had left the country pretty polarized. So, we ended up with Nixon and Watergate. I can't help thinking that Humphrey would have been the better choice.
I hasten to add that besides 1968 being the Vietnam, the back to back assassinations of King and the Bobby lead massive liberal/left disaffection with the entire political process, those on the left who remained within the party process backed McCarthy. To make matters worse, not only did Humphrey follow Johnson's war policy but proposed another 14,000 to the meat grinder in a year that saw the heaviest number of American casualties. Humphrey was a non-starter.
Another key factor in Nixon's win was his clever plan for dividing the protest vote. While the peace folks saw no reason to think that he would be ending the Vietnam War any time soon, Nixon did promise to end the draft. Those who opposed the war on moral grounds and would not vote for Nixon on that basis, might well vote for him if it meant escaping mandatory service in that war.
I recall quite clearly the election eve telethon staged for Nixon. The deal was that anyone could call in and ask Nixon a question, except of course none were allowed to speak directly to Nixon. Your call went to a bank of screeners and if it seemed safe to them, they forwarded your question to Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkenson who was serving as host. Wilkenson would then read the question to Nixon.
The best moment came when Wilkenson read the following question: "Mr. Nixon, I'm 19 years old and just received my notice to report for my physical. How fast can you get your all volunteer army started?"
And for a change, once in office, Nixon did deliver on that promise.
Just watched CNN's The Sixties; the segment on 1968.
There's an argument that civil rights was one of the reasons the Dems lost in '68. That may be true, but one rule that I have: Never lose sleep over a loss based on taking a moral ground! Civil Rights was the moral thing to do!
But the stance on the war, beatdown in Chicago and dissatisfaction over those showed a party in disarray! Rule Number 2: Leadership should never show itself in chaos!
I just recently read this article, a review of a book that raises some questions about events that may have impacted the outcome. The thumbnail is that Nixon torpedoed a potential truce just before the election.
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