Will 2020 be Another 1972 for Democrats?

Townhall.com ^ | April 27, 2017 | Victor Davis Hanson

[carolinablonde]

Go ahead. Just try to get that gear cluster to turn.

Perfect visual metaphor for the McGovern campaign.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Sadly, no. Because the electorate has moved far, far to the left in 45 years.

Were he alive today George McGovern would be regarded as a Democrat Centrist, and could probably win.

[carolinablonde]

But I think it's plausible that Wallace siphoned off enough Democratic votes in the states that Nixon won that it may have cost Humphrey a win in those states.

Same thing happened in '92 with Bush/Clinton/Perot. Perot didn't win any electoral votes himself, but he siphoned enough votes from Bush to give Clinton the win in some states.

[FirstFlaBn]

Twenty posts and nobody noticed this gaff:

Democrats would remain out of the White House until 1980, when Jimmy Carter ran a winning Humphrey-like campaign as a centrist populist outsider from the South.

Other than that, Hanson makes a good point. The Dems' anger at the '68 close result and at Nixon's refusal to immediately surrender South Vietnam addled their tiny brains and led to nominating a radical lefty protest candidate in '72.

Let's hope we see a repeat in '16.

[The_Republic_Of_Maine]

Nixon won overwhelming in the only vote that counts, the Electoral vote.

Richard Nixon Republican Spiro Agnew 301 electoral votes.

[Kaslin]

Actually Richard Nixon got 520 electoral votes which is a clear landslide. The only state that he did not win was MA

[Fred Hayek]

I wasn’t old enough to vote that year (one year short). But after watching the news coverage of the DNC’s nomination of McGovern and the voting on party platforms, I thought that the donks turned the corner and went Commie. I was hoping that Scoop Jackson would get the nomination instead. Little did I know that I was already becoming a conservative.

[Kaslin]

Bwahahaha

Excellent

[TBP]

Most of their potential nominees are potential McGoverns.

[Oratam]

Using the Hegelian Dialectic as a frame of reference, Soviet communism was the antithesis of the American free-market economy which was rightly perceived as the greatest threat to establishing a single all-powerful global government. Out of this thesis-antithesis, the hoped for synthesis, socialism, would rise somewhere, probably even geographically, in the middle.

Those who govern world events were horrified the synthesis they got was overtly nationalist with a racialist component. Such an ideology would never usher in the new global order they desired. However, it did provide a reason for war on a scale never before seen that could provide a demand for post-war institutions and organizations that would usher in that global order.

Considering the last go-around, I find it interesting that in its present form, European socialism is once again a German enterprise and it's being permitted. Or is it?

I think I understand why Turkey and now Syria and other Moslem peoples are being encouraged to invade Europe and replace its aging and atrophied population. Perhaps the new caliphate is the global one-world government those who direct world events will accept believing it can be "secularized" in the future. These enemies of human freedom think in terms of centuries so an Islamic planet for a millennium is acceptable trusting that one day it will be atheistic.

/tin foil hat

[Oratam]

I don't know why a thread about the 1972 presidential election prompted me to post what I did.

The causes of WW2 and the seemingly incongruous post-war period have troubled me for some time. Perhaps a discussion touching on the overtly communist direction of a major American political party was the trigger.

I could just as well have made the correlation between fighting communism in Vietnam and the Dems succumbing to Helsinki Syndrome and used post-911 America as a recent example of this phenomenon on a nationwide scale.

[raccoonradio]

Bumper stickers in MA post 72: Mass., the One and Only...Nixon 49, America 1

My first prez vote at age of 18 was in 80 for Reagan

[Signalman]

“Democrats would remain out of the White House until 1980, when Jimmy Carter ran a winning Humphrey-like campaign as a centrist populist outsider from the South.”
E
1976.

[EXCH54FE]

good one

[hinckley buzzard]

There is no question though that because of Wallace splitting the democrat vote, Nixon won many states he otherwise would not have won. Wallace gave the election to Nixon, pure and simple. Not that the democrats didn't deserve to lose.

The comparison with 1972 is this: after 1968 the democrat party decided they had to go whole hog to the left in order to win the budding minority coalition and the youth of the New Left. The divisiveness of the 1968 convention they blamed, not on the Left, but on the old guard of the party. They thought that by becoming "inclusive" they could consolidate their base. In 1972 they changed their convention rules and seated all manner of radical nutters, creeps like Julian Bond, eg, leading to the nomination of idiot leftist George McGovern. the result was an electoral wipe-out by Nixon.

VDH is seeing the 'rats make the same mistake now, after Trump's win, as they did in '72; not by moving to the center but by careering farther to the left. This would alienate a growing body of voters who are not interested in supporting violent black clad criminals in the streets, and who will have seen that Trump is actually a pretty good commonsense guy, not the end of the world they had been warned about. the prospect then is for Trump to win in an electoral wipe out in 2020 just as Nixon did in '72.

Let us pray.

[Impy]

I hope not, it was a “lonely landslide” accompanied by paltry House gains (and something like half of Nixon seats electing rats) and a LOSS of Senate seats.

[2ndDivisionVet]

I was in third grade in 1968. Every adult that I knew of voted for George Wallace.

[2ndDivisionVet]