United States presidential election, 1972
historyThe United States presidential election of 1972 was waged on the issues of radicalism and the Vietnam War. The Democratic nomination was eventually won by George McGovern, who ran an anti-war crusade against incumbent President Richard Nixon, but was handicapped by his outsider status as well as the scandal and subsequent firing of vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton.
Nixon, proclaiming that peace was at hand in Vietnam because of his policies, ridiculed McGovern as the radical candidate. The election took place on November 7, 1972. Nixon won the election, with a 23.2 percentage point margin of victory in the popular vote, the fourth largest margin in Presidential election history.
Nominations
Democratic Party nomination
Democratic candidates
- George McGovern, U.S. senator from South Dakota
- Hubert Humphrey, former U.S. Vice President from Minnesota
- George Wallace, U.S. governor of Alabama
- Edmund Muskie, U.S. senator from Maine
- Eugene J. McCarthy, former U.S. senator from Minnesota
- Wilbur Mills, Congressman from Arkansas
- Henry M. Jackson, U.S. senator from Washington
- Shirley Chisholm, U.S. representative from New York
- Terry Sanford, former U.S. governor of North Carolina
Candidates gallery
Senate Majority Whip Ted Kennedy had been the favorite to win the 1972 nomination, but his hopes were derailed by his role in the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident. He was not a candidate.
The favorite for the Democratic nomination then became Ed Muskie, the moderate who acquitted himself well as the 1968 Democratic vice-presidential candidate. In August 1971 Harris polling amid a growing economic crisis, Muskie came out on top of incumbent Nixon if the election had been held that day.
But then prior to the New Hampshire primary, the "Canuck Letter" was published in the Manchester Union-Leader. The letter, later revealed to have been a forgery produced as part of the "dirty tricks" campaign by Richard Nixon's staff members, claimed that Muskie had made disparaging remarks about French-Canadians. Subsequently, the paper published an attack on the character of Muskie's wife Jane, reporting that she drank and used off-color language. 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."»Remembering Ed Muskie", Online NewsHour, PBS, March 26 1996 . Muskie did worse than expected in the primary, while McGovern came in a surprisingly close second. McGovern now had the momentum, which was well orchestrated by his campaign manager, Gary Hart.
Alabama governor George Wallace, with his "outsider" image, did well in the South (he won every single county in the Florida primary) and in the north among alienated and dissatisfied voters. What might have become a forceful campaign was cut short when Wallace was shot while campaigning, and left paralyzed in an assassination attempt by Arthur Bremer. The day after the assassination attempt Wallace won the Michigan and Maryland primaries, but the shooting, which left him paralyzed, effectively ended his campaign.
In the end, McGovern succeeded in winning the nomination by winning primaries through grass-roots support in spite of establishment opposition. McGovern had led a commission to redesign the Democratic nomination system after the messy and confused 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—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.
Primaries popular vote results.
- Hubert Humphrey - 4,121,372 (25.77%)
- George McGovern - 4,053,451 (25.34%)
- George Wallace - 3,755,424 (23.48%)
- Edmund Muskie - 1,840,217 (11.51%)
- Eugene McCarthy - 553,990 (3.46%)
- Henry M. Jackson - 505,198 (3.16%)
- Shirley Chisholm - 430,703 (2.69%)
- Terry Sanford - 331,415 (2.07%)
- John Lindsay - 196,406 (1.23%)
- Samuel Yorty - 79,446 (0.50%)
- Wilbur Mills - 37,401 (0.23%)
- Walter E. Fauntroy - 21,217 (0.13%)
- Unpledged - 19,533 (0.12%)
- Ted Kennedy - 16,693 (0.10%)
- Vance Hartke - 11,798 (0.07%)
- Patsy Mink - 8,286 (0.05%)
- None - 6,269 (0.04%)
Notable endorsements
Hubert Humphrey
- Mayor Jack Sensenbrenner of Columbus, Ohio
'''George McGovern
- Senator Frank Church of Idaho
- Senator John V. Tunney of California
George Wallace
Edmund Muskie
- Former Governor and Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman of New York
- Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa
- Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana
- Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois
- Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska
- Former Senator Stephen M. Young of Ohio
- Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania
- Former Governor Michael DiSalle of Ohio
- Ohio State Treasurer Gertrude W. Donahey
- Astronaut John Glenn of Ohio
Shirley Chisholm
- Representative Ron Dellums of California
- Reverend Jesse Jackson of Illinois
Terry Sanford
- Former President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas
Henry M. Jackson
- Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia
1972 Democratic National Convention
The tally:
- George McGovern 1864.95
- Henry “Scoop” Jackson 525
- George Wallace 381.7
- Shirley Chisholm 151.95
- Terry Sanford 77.5
- Hubert Humphrey 66.7
- Wilbur Mills 33.8
- Edmund Muskie 24.3
- Edward M. Kennedy 12.7
- Sam Yorty 10
- Wayne Hays 5
- John Lindsay 5
- Fred Harris 2
- Eugene McCarthy 2
- Walter Mondale 2
- Ramsey Clark, Walter Fauntroy, Vance Hartke, Harold Hughes and Patsy Mink 1 each
Other potential vice-presidential candidates
- Reubin Askew, Governor of Florida
- Frank Church, U.S. senator from Idaho
- John J. Gilligan. Governor of Ohio
- Hubert Humphrey, U.S. senator from Minnesota
- Ted Kennedy, U.S. senator from Massachusetts
- Patrick Lucey, Governor of Wisconsin
- Wilbur Mills, U.S. representative from Arkansas
- Walter Mondale, U.S. senator from Minnesota
- Edmund Muskie, U.S. senator from Maine
- Gaylord Nelson, U.S. senator from Wisconsin
- Lawrence O'Brien, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from Massachusetts
- Abraham Ribicoff, U.S. senator from Connecticut
- Kevin White, Mayor of Boston
The vice-presidential vote
With hundreds of delegates either actively supporting Nixon or 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. The eventual winner was Senator Thomas Eagleton, who accepted the nomination despite not personally knowing McGovern very well, and privately disagreeing with many of McGovern's policies. » All Politics: CNN Time. "All The Votes...Really"
The vice presidential balloting went on so long that McGovern and Eagleton were forced to make their acceptance speeches at around three in the morning, local time.
A couple of weeks after the convention ended, it was discovered that Eagleton had undergone psychiatric electroshock therapy for depression, and had concealed this information from McGovern. McGovern initially claimed that he would back Eagleton “1000 percent,” only to ask Eagleton to withdraw three days later. This perceived indecisiveness was disastrous for the McGovern campaign.
After a week in which six prominent Democrats publicly refused the VP nomination, Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to the Kennedys and former ambassador to France and head of the War on Poverty, finally 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.
The Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 covers McGovern's campaign to win the Democratic nomination.
Novak was accused of manufacturing the quote. To rebut the criticism, Novak took the senator to lunch after the campaign and asked whether he could identify him as the source. The senator said he would not allow his identity to be revealed. "The McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that." Novak added.
On July 15, 2007, Novak disclosed on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Thomas Eagleton. Political analyst Bob Shrum says that Eagleton would never have been selected as McGovern's running mate if it had been known at the time that Eagleton was the source of the quote. "Boy, do I wish he would have let you publish his name. Then he never would have been picked as vice president," said Shrum. "Because the two things, the two things that happened to George McGovern—two of the things that happened to him—were the label you put on him, number one, and number two, the Eagleton disaster. We had a messy convention, but he could have, I think in the end, carried eight or 10 states, remained politically viable. And Eagleton was one of the great train wrecks of all time."
Polls showed that Nixon had a strong lead. He was challenged by two minor candidates, liberal Pete McCloskey of California and conservative John Ashbrook of Ohio. McCloskey ran as an anti-war and anti-Nixon candidate, while Ashbrook opposed Nixon's détente policies towards the China and the Soviet Union. In the New Hampshire primary McCloskey's platform of peace garnered 11% of the vote to Nixon's 83%, with Ashbrook receiving 6%. Nixon won 1323 of the 1324 delegates to the GOP convention, with McCloskey receiving the vote of one delegate from New Mexico.
Primaries popular vote result:
John Hospers of the newly-formed Libertarian Party was on the ballot only in Colorado and Washington and received only 3,573 popular votes. However, he did receive one electoral vote from Virginia from a Republican dissenter (see below). His vice-presidential candidate, Tonie Nathan became the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.
Benjamin Spock was nominated by the People's Party, which was formed in 1971.
Richard Nixon, who has been called "the greatest school desegregator in American history" by historian Dean Kotlowski due to his compliance with a 1971 Supreme Court ruling mandating desegregation,Kotlowski, Dean J. (2001), p. 37 was in favor of desegregation but not through forced means such as busing. Nixon ran a harsh campaign with an aggressive policy of keeping tabs on perceived enemies, and his campaign aides committed the Watergate burglary to steal Democratic Party information during the election. Nixon's level of personal involvement with the burglary was never clear, but his tactics during the later coverup would eventually destroy his public support and lead to his resignation. Also, Nixon's so-called "southern strategy" of reducing the pressure for school desegregation and otherwise restricting federal efforts on behalf of blacks had a powerful attraction to northern blue-collar workers as well as southerners. McGovern called the Watergate burglaries "the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler."
The election was held on November 7. This election had the lowest voter turnout for a presidential election since 1948, with only 55 percent of the electorate voting. Part of the steep drop from the previous elections can be explained by the ratification of the 26th Amendment which expanded the franchise to 18-year-olds.
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), with only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia voting for the challenger, resulting in an even more lopsided Electoral College tally.
Source (Popular Vote):
Source (Electoral 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 Nathan.
Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid
On April 25, 1972, George McGovern won the Massachusetts primary and journalist Bob Novak phoned Democratic politicians around the country, who agreed with his assessment that blue-collar workers voting for McGovern did not understand what he really stood for. On April 27, 1972 Novak reported in a column that an unnamed Democratic senator had talked to him about McGovern. "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," the Senator said. "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."»Meet the Press Transcript for July 15, 2007. "Interview with Robert NovakColumbia Tribune. "»A slice of history: Biographers of the late U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri will find some vivid anecdotes when they comb through his large collection of journals, letters and transcripts housed in Columbia" by Terry Ganey. 2008-09-21.
Primaries
Nixon was a popular incumbent president in 1972, as he seemed to have reached détente with China and USSR. He shrugged off the first glimmers of what, after the election, became the massive Watergate scandal.
Convention
Seven members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were brought on federal charges for conspiring to disrupt the Republican convention. They were acquitted by a federal jury in Gainesville, Florida.
Third parties
The only major third party candidate in the 1972 elections, Conservative congressman John G. Schmitz of the American Party (the party on whose ballot George Wallace ran in 1968), was on the ballot in 32 states and received 1,099,482 popular votes. Unlike Wallace, however, he received no electoral votes. Schmitz would make news again in the late 1990s when his daughter, Mary Kay Letourneau, was arrested for statutory rape.
General election
Campaign
George McGovern ran on a platform of ending the Vietnam War and instituting guaranteed minimum incomes for the nation's poor. His campaign was greatly crippled because of the electro-shock therapy controversy involving his original running mate, and because his views during the primaries had alienated many powerful Democrats. With McGovern's presence weakened by these factors, the Republicans successfully portrayed him as a half-crazy radical, and McGovern suffered a landslide defeat of 61%–38% to Nixon.
(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.
Corporate campaign contributions
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. Many companies complied, including Northrup-Grunman, 3M, American Airlines and Braniff Airlines. By 1976, prosecutors had convicted 18 American corporations of contributing illegally to Nixon's campaign.