Posted on 05/26/2010 6:36:33 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
LOL!
Nixon won Hawaii on election day. Weeks later the rats had a recount and stole it. Even though it’s electoral votes were meaningless and Nixon was not contesting Kennedy wins in any state.
Stephen Ambrose, whom on this matter I consider a reliable historian, concluded that Nixon would not have won, and that while the vote was extremely close, he indeed lost.
>And dumb Republican primary voters endorse him; the Republican primary voters are in many ways liable for the decline of America.<
Too right I am afraid.
They left us with little to chose from as usual it became the lesser of two evils.
That goes against long held conventional wisdom held on the right.
Personally although Ambrose was a million times more learned then myself I just can’t believe that the dems didn’t steal that one. ;)
I’m afraid I’d have to part company with Ambrose on that one. I believe there was a sufficient enough appearance of chicanery in at least the two key states (IL & TX) that were enough to turn the election. There were also other states where the outcome was so close where voter fraud was rampant in some areas (NJ & NM, for two examples) that just add fuel to the fire of suspicion.
In hindsight, I still wish Nixon had contested the election, though the reasons he chose not to were #1, that he might appear to the public a sore loser which might destroy any future viability for the same office, #2, that to investigate would be costly and troublesome with likely no speedy outcome, and the biggest one, #3, that it would rip the country apart. We had a taste of that in 2000 with Gore’s refusal to concede and the visceral hate and contempt it immediately produced towards Dubya he never fully recovered from. If Nixon had been finally seated (quite probably by a similar SCOTUS decision), he would’ve faced a similar situation as Dubya did, not to mention a hostile Democrat Congress who would’ve stymied anything he’d have tried to do. Just a really nasty scenario all around.
I can’t imagine what that would do to somebody knowing that their opponent had stolen the Presidential election and having to just “grin and bare it.” Probably three examples of that in U.S. history, the 1824 election (where Jackson got more votes, but deals struck in Congress gave it to JQ Adams, for which Jackson later said he wished he could’ve shot Henry Clay for “sealing the deal”), the 1876 election (where Gov. Tilden was the likely victor, and for which the GOP sold its soul to maintain the Presidency with its deal), and 1960. Of course, at least Jackson and Nixon were vindicated with future wins, while Tilden was just content to know he’d won.
1824 was fun. The House will likely never again have to choose the President. It might have happened in 1992 if Perot hadn’t oddly left the race and returned. The result would have been the same, Clinton.
In 1876 I’d have likely voted for Hayes but it seems pretty certain that Tilden was the rightful winner. He may have won if her ran again, he surprised everyone but not doing so.
I wonder about 1916 with the closeness of the vote in the key state, California.
Can’t feel too sorry for Hughes since he lost the popular vote. Feel sorry for the country though, cause Wilson sucked, the first socialist President.
That was a weird election. One headline after the vote read “Hugues likely elected”. The proto-Dewey defeats Truman. Hughes I think underperformed and Wilson overperformed in a lot of states getting a lot of the 1912 TR vote even though TR backed Hughes. But Republicans won a plurality in the House, with the rats needing the help of the independents to keep control.
I definitely would have wanted Nixon to challenge despite the consequences. But I think he would have lost the challenge.
1916 was interesting. I wouldn’t have said vote fraud got Wilson a second term, but his deception of the public on the issue of war (somewhat similar to the crap LBJ pulled in ‘64, making warmonger threats against Goldwater when LBJ ended up doing everything he alleged of Barry, short of dropping a nuke — I horrified my liberal uncle back several years ago (he was an AF pilot in Vietnam) when I said we should’ve used tactical nukes against N. Vietnam (the idea of sparing scores of casualties of our men on the ground). But I’m getting off topic...).
Hughes was probably one of the finer individuals to run for office who never won. Had he run and won (two terms), he’d have spared the nation both Wilson’s second term (and Edith’s Presidency) along with Harding’s. The only downside is we wouldn’t have had Coolidge, most likely. Who would’ve succeeded Hughes would be up in the air. He chose ex-VP Charles Fairbanks as his running mate, and Fairbanks died in 1918, so who would’ve been Hughes’s VP in 1920 ? I suspect perhaps someone from out West or the Midwest (maybe Harding might’ve ended up as VP that year, and promptly dying as Fairbanks did). So, 1924 would’ve been a big open race...
Wilson won CA by less than 4 K and with it the EC. I remember hearing something on the history channel long ago about a missing ballot box that ‘turned up’. With such a small margin I got to wonder.
1916 was almost a mirror image of 2000. Right down to NH being the only Wilson state in the NE.
“Hughes’s VP in 1920 ?”
Rule out Coolidge because of the close proximity of NY and MA?
Maybe Governor Lowden of Illinois? Wasn’t he pretty good?
I chucked at that, since this conversion started cause someone made an offhand comment about Nixon. :D
Ike.
If Nixon had the full backing of the incumbent, with all his power and lever-pulling, of course he would have challenged. But I don't think he could count on Ike to help him in any way. Think back to 2000: I can't recall any instances where Clinton really worked to help Gore in the challenge.
Certainly Paul Johnson agrees with you. Recently-—but unfortunately I can’t remember where-—I re-visited this in a lot of contemporary articles, many of them cited by Johnson. The upshot was that I think Johnson cherry-picked his evidence from one very partisan Republican investigator. But ultimately, the fact was that ALL challenges eventually would have somehow involved Chicago courts, and Nixon would have lost those-—even if they were appealed, it would have gone on forever. I wish I could remember the specific sources I read on this, as I was disappointed and wished they were different. I’d say, google Election of 1960 or Stolen election. Something like that. You’ll get a lot of articles of the day come up.
I’ve never thought about it before but you’re right, I don’t remember Clinton helping Gore.
Everything I’ve read said Ike took 1960 hard, almost like a personal insult that Nixon didn’t win his ‘third term’ for him. You’d think that would mean he would have favored a challenge. I guess he didn’t want to ‘divide the country’ with it.
In 1824, I feel sorry for Henry Clay. DE and NY did not have a popular vote for handing out electoral votes, and had one of the votes given to Crawford in each of those states gone to Clay instead, and had a faithless elector in MD not voted for Crawford despite him getting only 10% of the popular vote in the state (with Adams and Jackson each getting around 44%), Clay would have finished third in EVs and been eligible to be in the running for election by the House, where Clay would have almost certainly been elected president by his colleagues. Clay ran for president two other times, 1832 and 1844, and in 1844 he would have been elected over Polk had he been able to carry NY instead of losing it by just 1.05% (with Liberty Party candidate James Birney playing spoiler by getting 3.25% in the state).
I do not feel sorry at all for Samuel Tilden, even though he was from what I’ve read a good man. Do you think that it’s a coincidence that the only three ex-Confederate states whose state governmentd did not actively prevent blacks from voting (because they still had Reconstruction governments) were the only three Southern states that Hayes was able to carry? Jim Crow made sure that Tilden got huge margins in every other state in the Deep South. And in those three states, SC, LA and FL, Tilden’s claim that he had narrowly won the popular vote ignored the fact that in many precincts across those states blacks were systematically prevented from voting by the KKK (with the local government pointedly looking the other way) or by the local government itself; since it would have been illegitimate for the state government to estimate how many votes blacks would have cast in those precincts, much less to assume how they would have voted (although in the Deep South in 1876 blacks voted as heavily Republican as they voted Democrat in 2008), the state government decided to throw out all votes cast in the precincts in which free elections had not been held, which resulted in Hayes carrying all three ststes and earning the states’ electoral votes. That the Demcrats in the national Electoral Commission voted to hand such EV’s to Tilden fir partisan, not justice, reasons is clear from the fact that every Democrat on the Electoral Commission also voted to give Tilden one elector from Oregon (a state carried by Hayed by an unambiguous margin) because one of the Hayes electors on the ballot was a Postmaster General (whom Democrats claimed was an “Officer of the United States ineligible to serve as a presidential elector) and when he resigned in favor of an alternate Hayes elector Oregon’s Democrat governor decided ultra vires to declare that a Tilden elector should replace him. It would have been a terrible injustice for Tilden to have been declared the winner over Hayes.
And in 1916, the only reason why Wilson won the popular vote over Hughes was because Jim Crow prevented blacks from voting in the Deep South and Wilson thus got vote percentages such as 76% in AL, 69% in FL, 80% in GA, 77% in TX, 86% in LA, 93% in MS and 97% in SC. As for the Electoral College, Hughes would have won it despite getting zero EVs in the South had he been able ti carry CA (as you mentioned), where he lost by only 0.38%. Someone posted recently here on FR that California GOP Senator Hiram Johnson, who had been TR’s runningmate in the 1912 election, had refused to endorse (or at least campaign for) Hughes, and that had he done so Hughes wouldhave certainly carried the state (and thus the presidency). Alas, we were stuck with virulently racist “liberal fascist” president for four more years.
I once wrote a paper on Henry Clay, and for a while was obsessed with him. But while I despise Jackson, I came to strongly dislike Clay for his lack of courage in confronting slavery. This, more than anything else, kept him out of the presidency.
If Ike felt that way, why didn’t he endorse Nixon until very late in the campaign; and Ike virtually did nothing to campaign for Nixon.
It is called addiction.....to the govt credit cards.
“The Senator has told us that the Federal government has failed to secure the border. Doesn’t he understand that he “is” the Federal government? Remember the McCain-Kennedy Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, followed by two Comprehensive Immigration Reform Acts?”
McCain has to go!!!
PLEASE ARIZONA, don’t fall for this again!
Great tune! Hilarious and Accurate!
FLUSH THE JOHN! McCain has to go!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJobkdeho88
Polk was pro-slavery, more so than Clay, so I would think that abolitionists would support Clay over Polk. However, enough voted for Birney to keep Clay from winning.
I don’t think any abolitionist president was elected between JQ Adams in 1824 and Lincoln in 1860 (with the possible exception of Van Buren in 1836). It wasn’t exactly a time of principled national politicians.
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