Posted on 04/27/2017 5:42:47 AM PDT by Kaslin
Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president.
The year 1968 was a tumultuous one that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson's unpopular lame-duck Democratic administration imploded due to massive protests against the Vietnam War.
Yet Humphrey almost defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent).
Infighting Democrats could have defeated the unpopular Nixon if not for a few unforeseen developments.
Their convention in Chicago turned into a creepy carnival of televised rioting and radical protests. Hippies and leftists were seen battling police in the streets on primetime news.
The former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran as a states' rights third-party candidate and drew 13.5 percent of the vote. Wallace destroyed the Democrats' traditional hold on the old "solid South" by winning five Southern states outright. He also siphoned off enough traditional Democratic supporters to give Nixon astonishing Republican victories in half a dozen other states in the region.
Nixon won over a few Northern blue-collar states that had often voted Democratic, such as Wisconsin and Ohio -- again with help from Wallace, who appealed to fed-up, working-class Democrats.
What was the lesson from 1968?
The Democrats could have recalibrated their message to appeal more to working-class voters.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Perfect visual metaphor for the McGovern campaign.
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.
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.
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.
Nixon won overwhelming in the only vote that counts, the Electoral vote.
Richard Nixon Republican Spiro Agnew 301 electoral votes.
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.
Bwahahaha
Excellent
Most of their potential nominees are potential McGoverns.
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
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.
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
“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.
good one
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.
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.
I was in third grade in 1968. Every adult that I knew of voted for George Wallace.
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