1968 Presidential Election
The 1968 election in the United States was a pivotal moment in American politics. It was marked by significant events such as the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Richard Nixon ultimately won the presidency, marking a shift in the political landscape and setting the stage for significant changes in the years that followed.
6 Key excerpts on "1968 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePubNixon's Court
His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences
- Kevin J. McMahon(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...Richard Nixon would play a central role ensuring its demise. Of course, the Democrats would continue to control the Congress for another quarter of a century, at times wreaking havoc for Republican presidents. Jimmy Carter would also recapture the White House for his party eight years later, narrowly defeating the pardon-afflicted Gerald Ford. But nevertheless, after March 31, 1968, Democrats were on the defensive, generally working to protect their party’s past accomplishments instead of acting on a bold set of new initiatives for the future. The Democratic Party’s continuing success in a variety of electoral arenas meant that its defense was a formidable one. But it was still on defense, not the preferred position in the electoral field of play. In the presidential campaign of 1968 the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights protection had devastating consequences for its chances of electoral success in the South as Alabama governor George Wallace abandoned the party for his own campaign for the White House. The Democratic Party also had difficulties in the North, particularly with social conservative ethnic Democrats turned off by recent events in the streets of America and a perception that their party cared too much about advancing civil rights and not enough about their own concerns. 2 This potential for a racialized backlash vote against the Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey gave Nixon and George Wallace an opening in places once thought to be safe for Democrats. In attempt to limit the backlash vote, Humphrey focused on traditional Democratic themes like helping the workingman and promoting equal rights for everyone. But he was sure to emphasize his desire to restore law and order as well. 3 To further his appeal, he selected a vice-presidential nominee intended to please white ethnic voters, someone to calm their fears about the state of American society and the changes underway...
eBook - ePub- Peter Ling(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 The 1960 campaign A good time to run The four-year presidential election gap ensures that, every twenty years since 1800, Americans have chosen a president to lead them firmly into a new decade. On six consecutive occasions from 1840 to 1980 the president elected in this “zero” year died in office. Among them were the assassinated presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and, of course, John F. Kennedy. Only Ronald Reagan's recovery from the gunshot wound he suffered in 1981 ended this fateful cycle. If the pattern was known to the politicians of 1960, however, it was a weak deterrent. On the Republican side, Vice President Richard Nixon was the clear front-runner, and he soon became the putative party nominee when his liberal rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, declined to run. Rockefeller did, however, continue to cause problems for Nixon, as he strove to appease both Rockefeller liberals and right-wing Republicans, increasingly identified with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. On the Democratic side, the field was much more crowded. In the primaries Kennedy jostled for the nomination with liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey, both men striving to prove their vote-getting potential. Since most primary contests in this period were nonbinding in their allocation of convention delegates, the nomination was not secure until the convention itself, and other contenders—Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, and twice-nominated liberal standard-bearer Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois—positioned themselves for a move when the party gathered in Los Angeles. Stevenson in particular denied any wish for a third nomination, yet still hoped to be drafted by his convention supporters. The auguries for Democrats in 1960 were promising. First and foremost, the hugely popular Eisenhower was prevented from running for a third term by the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951...
eBook - ePubHow Did We Get Here?
From TR to Donald Trump
- Robert Dallek(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Harper(Publisher)
...Chapter 8 Richard M. Nixon America in Crisis Johnson’s decision not to run again opened the way for other Democrats to seek the presidency. By June 1968, the party’s front-runner was Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, former attorney general and now senator from New York. Winning the California primary largely assured his nomination, though it will always remain uncertain because he was shot and killed by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a Palestinian migrant to the United States who saw Kennedy as an advocate of Israel and an enemy of Palestinian rights. At the Democratic convention that summer in Chicago, marked by street riots protesting America’s continuing war in Vietnam, the party nominated Hubert H. Humphrey, former Minnesota senator and Johnson vice president who, despite dissent from Johnson’s Vietnam policy, was identified with the unpopular president and his failing war. Humphrey’s opponent was Richard Nixon, whose service as a congressman, senator, and vice president made him readily recognizable. It was surprising that in a time of considerable domestic turmoil—riots in inner cities, marches and violent opposition to the Vietnam War, when a French travel agent advertised “See America While It Lasts”—that the country would turn to two of its most familiar political figures as possible successors to Johnson. It spoke perhaps to the eagerness among many for some reassurance that the nation could sustain its system of government. Richard Nixon could not measure up to the test of character usually required of a presidential candidate: He had a reputation as “Tricky Dick,” someone who had lied to the public in his runs for the House and the Senate. And like Joe McCarthy, he was notorious for a history of character assassination, exceeding the underhandedness of LBJ. But his long career in national politics could help him restore public order...
eBook - ePub- Gary A. Donaldson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
...Seeing the volatility of the postwar political world, groups in the Democratic party struggled for power, and they all seemed to move toward 1948 with a “succeed or destroy” attitude toward the party. One important theme of the 1948 election is always the deep splits in the Democratic party, but it was in the Republican party that the split was the most disastrous. The Democrats healed their wounds for one brief moment, just long enough to vote Truman into office, but the Republican left-right split produced for Truman the issue of the Eightieth Congress, and that issue carried the president right into his November victory. The election of 1948 shaped postwar politics in both parties. For the Democrats, at least through Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the goal would be to maintain the coalition—pacify the various groups—by holding on to the party’s political center as Truman did. For the Republicans, the answer would be to heal the wounds between the left and the right—as Eisenhower would do through the 1950s—and to expand the party’s voter base, particularly into the South. The election reaffirmed the strength of the American party system, the strength of both parties, and the strength of the American electorate. The impact was great....
eBook - ePubKent State
Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties
- Thomas M. Grace(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- University of Massachusetts Press(Publisher)
...Wallace had generated indisputable fervor, but that passion fed off anger and racial resentment, not hope. Voters had twice rejected Nixon, and Humphrey’s support remained thin even in his own party. Voters seemed motivated to stop the candidates they most feared. 52 As the clock reached midnight on the East Coast, NBC television broadcast that Humphrey had a 1 percentage point lead in the national popular vote. The election still hung in the balance as Cleveland’s large African American population delivered what a research team deemed “an enormous vote to Humphrey.” Ultimately, it proved too little. Nixon took Ohio by 91,000 votes, making it the closest presidential race in the state since Harry Truman’s victory twenty years before. The Beacon Journal had predicted in its final pre-election poll that Nixon would win Ohio by 14 percent; in the end, he prevailed by just over 2 percent. Humphrey carried Portage along with the urban counties of Summit, Cuyahoga, Trumbull, and Mahoning. Labor succeeded in whittling Wallace’s showing to fewer than 12 percent of the total, making the race competitive and enabling Humphrey to run closer to Nixon than Kennedy had in his 1960 win. The near comeback, however, provided little consolation to Humphrey and those who sought to maintain the New Deal order. They had suffered a momentous defeat. 53 The frayed Roosevelt coalition had not been the only loser, for the peace movement had lost as well. While most in the antiwar community saw Humphrey as nothing more than Johnson’s minion, the vice president, in victory, would have headed a divided party with the peace wing in ascendance. Having had the negative example of a president who failed to heed the voice of that movement, it is unlikely that Humphrey would have ignored the growing strength of the antiwar forces inside and outside the party...
eBook - ePubRonald Reagan
The American Presidency
- David Mervin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The Democrats in the 1980s have continued to dominate congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative elections. As a party, the Republicans, in electoral terms, remain weak below the presidential level and Reagan’s victory in 1980 can now be seen as largely a personal rather than an ideological or party triumph. By the end of the 1970s the American electorate was in a fluid, dealigned state with parties no longer able to provide the degree of structure that they had contributed in the past. Parties, in many respects, were no longer taken seriously by the voters; many more people now disavowed parties altogether and declared themselves to be independents. Few looked upon parties in a favourable light and majorities even of party identifiers were unable to perceive any important differences between what the Republican and Democratic parties stood for. 48 Other evidence of the amorphous state of the electorate in 1980 was to be found in poll data revealing rapidly shifting tides of support for various candidates. Thus, a survey in November 1979 showed that 69 per cent preferred Edward Kennedy as the Democratic candidate for the presidency as compared to 31 per cent for Jimmy Carter. By early January 1980, 58 per cent preferred Carter while 42 per cent went for Kennedy and when, in the same poll Carter was matched with Ronald Reagan he outpolled the Californian 65 per cent–35 per cent. Another poll in July 1980 had Reagan leading Carter 55 per cent–27 per cent and then in September public opinion swung back to Carter again giving him 44 per cent to Reagan’s 40 per cent. Finally, in the election itself Reagan led Carter by ten percentage points. To add to these impressions of an electorate in a constant state of flux there were other polls showing that many voters only decided at the last minute how to vote...
