|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Nixon/Agnew, Blue denotes those won by McGovern/Shriver. Grey is the electoral vote for John Hospers by a Virginia faithless elector. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Watergate |
|---|
| Events |
| Timeline Criminality 1972 presidential election Watergate burglaries Watergate tapes "Saturday Night Massacre" United States v. Nixon Inauguration of Gerald Ford |
| People |
| Richard Nixon |
| Groups |
|
"White House Plumbers" Senate Watergate Committee |
The United States presidential election of 1972 was the 47th quadrennial United States presidential election. It was held on November 7, 1972. The Democratic Party's nomination was eventually won by Senator George McGovern, who ran an anti-war campaign against incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, but was handicapped by his outsider status and limited support from his own party, as well as the medical scandal and firing of vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton.
Emphasizing a good economy and his successes in foreign affairs (especially ending American involvement in Vietnam and establishing relations with China), Nixon won the election in a landslide, with 60.7% of the popular vote, 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 U.S. presidential election. McGovern only won the electoral votes of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The subsequent Watergate scandal inspired bumper stickers saying "Don't blame me – I'm from Massachusetts".[1]
This is the earliest United States presidential election where one of the two major candidates is still living.
Contents |
Democratic candidates:
Senate Majority Whip Ted Kennedy, the youngest brother of former President John F. Kennedy and former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had been the favorite to win the 1972 nomination, but he had announced he would not be a candidate.
The favorite for the Democratic nomination then became Ed Muskie,[2] the 1968 vice-presidential nominee.
New York Representative Shirley Chisholm announced she would run, and became the first African American 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.[3]
South Dakota Senator George McGovern entered the race as an anti-war, progressive candidate, picking up where Eugene McCarthy had left off in 1968. 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.
Alabama Governor George Wallace, with his anti-integrationist 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 effectively ended his campaign.
On April 25, 1972, George McGovern won the Massachusetts primary and journalist Robert 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 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."
Novak was accused of manufacturing the quote and to rebut the criticism, Novak took the senator to lunch after the campaign and asked whether he could identify him as the source but the senator said he would not allow his identity to be revealed. "Oh, he had to run for re-election. The McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that," says Novak.
For years speculation continued that Novak had, in effect, acted as a surrogate for either other Democratic candidates or for the Republicans; an allegation Novak denied. Novak refused to identify his source until, on July 15, 2007 he disclosed on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Thomas Eagleton (McGovern’s first running mate, who later resigned from the ticket); there was also the comment that if this was known in 1972, Eagleton would not have been on the ticket. Eagleton died in March 2007.
In the end, Senator George McGovern succeeded in winning the nomination by winning primaries through grassroots support in spite of establishment opposition. McGovern had led a commission to redesign 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.
Primaries popular vote results:[4]
Edmund Muskie
Hubert Humphrey
George McGovern
George Wallace
Shirley Chisholm
Terry Sanford
Henry M. Jackson
Results:
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 (including one, Mao Zedong, who was not from the United States and was in fact a Communist leader in China). 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.[14]
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.
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.[15] 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.[16][17][18][19][20] 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.
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, 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.
Republican candidates:
Richard Nixon was a popular incumbent president in 1972, as he seemed to have reached 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 11% of the vote to Nixon's 83%, with Ashbrook receiving 6%. Nixon won 1323 of the 1324 delegates to the Republican convention, with McCloskey receiving the vote of one delegate from New Mexico.
Primaries popular vote result:[21]
Seven members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were brought on federal charges for conspiring to disrupt the Republican convention.[22] They were acquitted by a federal jury in Gainesville, Florida.[22]
The only major third party candidate in the 1972 election was conservative Republican Representative John G. Schmitz, who ran on the American Party ticket (the party on whose ballot 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.
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 Nathalia Nathan became the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.
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.
Alice Cooper (Vincent Damon Furnier) of the Alice Cooper Band participated in the election of 1972 as a publicity stunt to promote the group's album "Billion Dollar Babies", which was due to be released in 1973. Though the shock rock band received few votes, their campaign song "Elected" became a hit.
George 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 alienating many powerful Democrats, the perception that his foreign policy was too extreme, and the revelation that his original running mate Thomas Eagleton had undergone electro-shock therapy for depression. Eagleton was eventually replaced by Sargent Shriver. With McGovern's campaign weakened by these factors, the Republicans successfully portrayed him as a radical left-wing extremist, and McGovern suffered a landslide defeat to Nixon of 61%–38% .
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,[23] was in favor of desegregation but not through forced means such as busing.[24] Nixon 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.
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. It was also the first election since 1808 in which New York did not have the largest number of electors in the Electoral College.
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, and the state of Minnesota, which has voted for Democratic candidates in presidential elections ever since, currently the longest time of any state voting for the Democrats. Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia voted for the challenger, resulting in an even more lopsided Electoral College tally.
It was the first time in American history in which a Republican candidate carried every Southern state. By this time, all the Southern states except Arkansas had been carried by a Republican in either the previous election, or the 1964 election.
| Presidential candidate | Party | Home state | Popular vote | Electoral vote |
Running mate | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Pct | Vice-presidential candidate | Home state | Elect. vote | ||||
| Richard Milhous Nixon | Republican | California | 47,168,710 | 60.7% | 520 | Spiro Theodore Agnew | Maryland | 520 |
| George Stanley McGovern | Democratic | South Dakota | 29,173,222 | 37.5% | 17 | Robert Sargent Shriver | Maryland | 17 |
| John G. Schmitz | American Independent | California | 1,100,868 | 1.4% | 0 | Thomas J. Anderson | Tennessee | 0 |
| Linda Jenness | Socialist Workers | Georgia | 83,380(b) | 0.1% | 0 | Andrew Pulley | Illinois | 0 |
| Benjamin Spock | People's | California | 78,759 | 0.1% | 0 | Julius Hobson | District of Columbia | 0 |
| John G. Hospers | Libertarian | California | 3,674 | 0.0% | 1(a) | Theodora Nathan | Oregon | 1(a) |
| Other | 135,414 | 0.2% | — | Other | — | |||
| Total | 77,744,027 | 100% | 538 | 538 | ||||
| Needed to win | 270 | 270 | ||||||
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).
(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.
(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.
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.[25] Many companies complied, including Northrop Grumman, 3M, American Airlines and Braniff Airlines.[25] By 1976, prosecutors had convicted 18 American corporations of contributing illegally to Nixon's campaign.[25]
Australian Journal of Politics & History, Mar1973, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p28-47
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||