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Richard Nixon Republican
The United States presidential election of 1972 was the 47th quadrennial Republican President Richard Nixon, but was handicapped by his outsider status, limited support from his own party, the perception of many voters that he was a left-wing extremist and the scandal that resulted from the firing of vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton.
Emphasizing a good economy and his successes in foreign affairs, such as coming near to ending American involvement in the Vietnam War and establishing relations with China, Nixon decisively defeated McGovern. Overall, Nixon won 60.7% of the popular vote, a percentage only slightly lower than Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, but with a larger margin of victory in the popular vote (23.2%), the fourth largest in presidential election history. He received almost 18 million more popular votes than McGovern, the widest margin of any United States presidential election. McGovern only won the electoral votes of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. No candidate since had managed to equal or surpass Nixon's total percentage or margin of the popular vote, and his electoral vote total and percentage has been surpassed only once, and his state total matched only once, by Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Also in this election, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American to run for a major party nomination, and Patsy Mink was the first Asian American candidate to run for the Democratic Party nomination. It also was the first time that Hawaii was carried by a Republican, becoming the last of the 50 states to do so. Together with the House and Senate elections of 1972, it was the first electoral event in which people aged 18 to 20 could vote in any state, according to the provisions of the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This is also the most recent presidential election where at least one electoral vote was won by a candidate who, at the time of the election, was neither a Republican or Democrat.
Overall, 15 people declared their candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination. They were:[2]
French-Canadians – a remark likely to injure Muskie's support among the French-American population in northern New England. Subsequently, the paper published an attack on the character of Muskie's wife Jane, reporting that she drank and used off-color language during the campaign. Muskie made an emotional defense of his wife in a speech outside the newspaper's offices during a snowstorm. Though Muskie later stated that what had appeared to the press as tears were actually melted snowflakes, the press reported that Muskie broke down and cried, shattering the candidate's image as calm and reasoned.[6]
Nearly two years before the election, South Dakota Senator
United States Senator, South Dakota, 1963—1981
Australian Journal of Politics & History, Mar1973, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p28-47
As part of the continuing investigation in 1974–75, Watergate scandal prosecutors offered companies that had given illegal campaign contributions to Nixon's re-election campaign lenient sentences if they came forward.[34] Many companies complied, including Northrop Grumman, 3M, American Airlines and Braniff Airlines.[34] By 1976, prosecutors had convicted 18 American corporations of contributing illegally to Nixon's campaign.[34]
On June 17, five months before election day, five men broke into the Democratic National Convention headquarters at the Watergate hotel in Washington, D.C.; the resulting investigation led to the revelation of attempted cover-ups within the Nixon administration. Known as the Watergate scandal, the exposed corruption cost Nixon public and political support, and he resigned on August 9, 1974, in the face of probable impeachment charges by Congress.
Results by county, shaded according to winning candidate's percentage of the vote
(a)A Virginia faithless elector, Roger MacBride, though pledged to vote for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, instead voted for Libertarian candidates John Hospers and Theodora "Tonie" Nathan.[31] (b)In Arizona, Pima and Yavapai counties had a ballot malfunction that counted many votes for both a major party candidate and Linda Jenness of the Socialist Workers Party. A court ordered that the ballots be counted for both. As a consequence, Jenness received 16% and 8% of the vote in Pima and Yavapai, respectively. 30,579 of her 30,945 Arizona votes are from those two counties. Some sources do not count these votes for Jenness.
Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1972 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (August 7, 2005). Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (August 7, 2005). Source (Close States): http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/stats.php?year=1972&f=0&off=0&elect=0 (Retrieved: January 24, 2013).
Although the McGovern campaign believed that its candidate had a better chance of defeating Nixon because of the new Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution that lowered the national voting age to 18 from 21, a majority of those under 21 voted for Nixon.[32] The 1972 election was the first in American history in which a Republican candidate carried every single Southern state, continuing the region's transformation from a Democratic bastion into a Republican one. By this time, all the Southern states except Arkansas and Texas had been carried by a Republican in either the previous election or the 1964 election. As a result of this election, Massachusetts was the only state not to be carried by Nixon in any of his three presidential campaigns. As of 2012, this is also the last election where Minnesota was carried by the Republican candidate (Minnesota later being the only state not won by Ronald Reagan in either 1980 or 1984). This election also made Nixon the second former Vice President in American history to be elected and reelected, after Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and 1804.
Nixon's percentage of the popular vote was only slightly less than Lyndon Johnson's record in the 1964 election, and his margin of victory was slightly larger. Nixon won a majority vote in 49 states, including McGovern's home state of South Dakota. Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia voted for the challenger, resulting in an even more lopsided Electoral College tally. The election saw the lowest voter turnout for a presidential election since 1948, with only 55 percent of the electorate voting, perhaps because of voter apathy caused by the foregone conclusion of a Nixon landslide. It was also the first election since 1808 in which New York did not have the largest number of electors in the Electoral College, having fallen to 41 electors versus California's 45.
McGovern ran on a platform of immediately ending the Vietnam War and instituting guaranteed minimum incomes for the nation's poor. His campaign was harmed by his views during the primaries (which alienated many powerful Democrats), the perception that his foreign policy was too extreme, and the Eagleton debacle. With McGovern's campaign weakened by these factors, the Republicans successfully portrayed him as a radical left-wing extremist incompetent to serve as president. Nixon led in the polls by large margins throughout the entire campaign. He ran a campaign with an aggressive policy of keeping tabs on perceived enemies, and his aides committed the Watergate burglary to steal Democratic Party information during the campaign.
Linda Jenness was nominated by the Socialist Workers Party, with Andrew Pulley as her running-mate. Benjamin Spock and Julius Hobson were nominated for president and vice-president, respectively by, the People's Party.
John Hospers of the newly formed Libertarian Party was on the ballot only in Colorado and Washington and received 3,573 votes, winning no states. However, he did receive one electoral vote from Virginia from a Republican faithless elector (see below). The Libertarian vice-presidential nominee Theodora "Tonie" Nathan became the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.[31]
The only major George Wallace ran in 1968). He was on the ballot in 32 states and received 1,099,482 votes. Unlike Wallace, however, he did not win a majority of votes cast in any state, and received no electoral votes.
Seven members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were brought on federal charges for conspiring to disrupt the Republican convention.[30] They were acquitted by a federal jury in Gainesville, Florida.[30]
Primaries popular vote result:[29]
Richard Nixon was a popular incumbent president in 1972, as he was credited with achieving détente with the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Polls showed that Nixon held a strong lead in the Republican primaries. He was challenged by two candidates, liberal Pete McCloskey of California and conservative John Ashbrook of Ohio. McCloskey ran as an anti-war candidate, while Ashbrook opposed Nixon's détente policies towards China and the Soviet Union. In the New Hampshire primary McCloskey garnered 19.8% of the vote to Nixon's 67.6%, with Ashbrook receiving 9.7%.[28] Nixon won 1323 of the 1324 delegates to the Republican convention, with McCloskey receiving the vote of one delegate from New Mexico. Vice president Spiro Agnew was re-nominated by acclamation; while both the party's moderate wing and Nixon himself had wanted to replace him with a new running-mate (the moderates favoring Nelson Rockefeller, and Nixon favoring John Connally), it was ultimately concluded that the loss of Angew's base of conservative supporters would be too big of a risk.
Republican candidates:
After a week in which six prominent Democrats refused the vice-presidential nomination, Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy, former Ambassador to France and former Director of the Peace Corps, accepted. He was officially nominated by a special session of the Democratic National Committee. By this time, McGovern's poll ratings had plunged from 41 to 24 percent.
After the convention ended, it was discovered that Eagleton had undergone psychiatric electroshock therapy for depression and had concealed this information from McGovern. A Time magazine poll taken at the time found that 77 percent of the respondents said "Eagleton's medical record would not affect their vote." Nonetheless, the press made frequent references to his "shock therapy," and McGovern feared that this would detract from his campaign platform.[22] McGovern subsequently consulted confidentially with preeminent psychiatrists, including Eagleton's own doctors, who advised him that a recurrence of Eagleton's depression was possible and could endanger the country should Eagleton become president.[23][24][25][26][27] McGovern had initially claimed that he would back Eagleton "1000 percent," only to ask Eagleton to withdraw three days later. This perceived lack of conviction in sticking with his running mate was disastrous for the McGovern campaign.
The vice-presidential balloting went on so long that McGovern and Eagleton were forced to make their acceptance speeches at around two in the morning, local time.
With hundreds of delegates angry at McGovern for one reason or another, the vote was chaotic, with at least three other candidates having their names put into nomination and votes scattered over 70 candidates.[21] The eventual winner was Senator Thomas Eagleton.
Results:
Hubert Humphrey
George McGovern
George Wallace
Shirley Chisholm
Terry Sanford
Henry M. Jackson
Primaries popular vote results:[11]
In the end, McGovern won the nomination by winning primaries through grassroots support in spite of establishment opposition. McGovern had led a commission to re-design the Democratic nomination system after the divisive nomination struggle and convention of 1968. The fundamental principle of the McGovern Commission—that the Democratic primaries should determine the winner of the Democratic nomination—have lasted throughout every subsequent nomination contest. However, the new rules angered many prominent Democrats whose influence was marginalized, and those politicians refused to support McGovern's campaign (some even supporting Nixon instead), leaving the McGovern campaign at a significant disadvantage in funding compared to Nixon.
Wallace was shot in an assassination attempt by Arthur Bremer on May 15. Wallace was struck by four bullets and left paralyzed. The day after the assassination attempt, Wallace won the Michigan and Maryland primaries, but the shooting effectively ended his campaign.
On April 25, George McGovern won the Massachusetts primary. Two days later, journalist Robert Novak claimed in a column that a Democratic senator whom he did not name said of McGovern: "The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot. Once middle America – Catholic middle America, in particular – finds this out, he's dead." The label stuck and McGovern became known as the candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid." It became Humphrey's battle cry to stop McGovern — especially in the Nebraska primary.[9][10]
On January 25, 1972, New York Representative Shirley Chisholm announced she would run, and became the first African American woman to run for the Democratic or Republican presidential nomination. Hawaii Representative Patsy Mink also announced she would run and became the first Asian American to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.[8]
McGovern was able to pull together support from the anti-war movement and other grassroots support to win the nomination in a primary system he had played a significant part in designing. [7]
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