Presidential election in the United States in 1968

‹  1964  •   •  1972 ›
46th presidential election
5th November 1968
			Republican Party
			Richard Nixon / Spiro Agnew
			electors					301
			be right				31,783,783
									43.4%
			Democratic Party
			Hubert Humphrey / Ed Muskie
			electors					191
			be right				31,271,839
									42.7%
			American Independent Party
			George Wallace / Curtis LeMay
			electors					46
			be right				9.901.118
									13.5%
Election results by state
32 states   Nixon / Agnew						13 states + DC   Humphrey / Muskie
5 states   Wallace / LeMay
President of the United States
Before the election Lyndon B. Johnson Democratic Party						Elected Richard Nixon Republican Party

The 46th election of the President of the United States of America took place on November 5, 1968 . Lyndon B. Johnson , the incumbent president, did not stand for re-election.

The Republican Richard Nixon was elected , who was able to prevail over the incumbent Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey with a narrow number of votes, but with a clear lead among the electorates .

Candidates

Democrats

Humphrey campaigning in New York in the fall of 1968

Although the 22nd Amendment to the American Constitution limited the electoral election of the president to two terms, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson was not excluded from voting. Johnson had assumed the presidency in November 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and ended his current term before he was re-elected for a full term in the 1964 election . However, since more than half of Kennedy's term in office had elapsed, Johnson could have been re-elected.

In early 1968, therefore, President Johnson was the most likely Democratic Party candidate among the US public. On March 31, 1968, his announcement that he would not run again took the whole nation by surprise. Johnson announced at the same time that he would use the remaining months in the office for negotiations to end the Vietnam War and not want to expose himself to the domestic political strains of a presidential election campaign. In fact, he had - among other things, severely weakened by the escalation of the war in the wake of the Tet Offensive - only surprisingly narrowly prevailed against the intra-party anti-Vietnam War candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primaries . A few days later, Robert Kennedy , a brother of Johnson's murdered predecessor in office, was another Democrat who entered the election campaign. For the next area code, internal opinion polls even predicted a defeat for the president. Johnson's health was also in poor health.

With Johnson's resignation, the way was clear for Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey , whose statement when announcing his candidacy that he wanted to campaign for the “politics of joy” (a politics of joy or fun), among other things, was often felt to be less sensitive became, in view of the foreign ( Vietnam War ) and domestic (racial unrest after the assassination of Martin Luther King ) crises in which the USA found itself.

However, Humphrey's official entry into the election campaign did not take place until the end of April and was therefore too late to be able to participate in the remaining primary elections, which thus became primarily a duel between Senators Kennedy and McCarthy, both of whom represented the left wing of the party. Kennedy won in Indiana , Nebraska , South Dakota and California , McCarthy in Oregon . With the victory in California, Kennedy had brought 622 party congress delegates on his side, overtaking McCarthy (305 delegates). However, both lagged behind Humphrey, who, according to media reports, already had 1,067 delegates, since the 1968 primary elections only took place in a minority of the federal states and the influence of the vice president was obviously greater in several of those states in which the party congress delegates were appointed by the party apparatus. 1312 delegates were required for the nomination. While Humphrey assumed that he would be able to maintain his lead until the party congress and be nominated there without a primary victory, Kennedy hoped to make up his deficit in the remaining two and a half months, which was considered difficult, if not impossible. After 1968, no presidential candidate could be nominated without having achieved sufficient victories in the primaries.

The question of the democratic nomination was not yet decided when a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan living in Pasadena carried out a shooting attack on Kennedy on the evening of the California primary, as a result of which the senator died the next day. The perpetrator's motive was presumably outrage at the emphatically pro-Israeli statements by Kennedy, which even surpassed similar positions of his competitors and were aimed particularly at the courted Jewish electorate. After the assassination, President Johnson ordered all presidential candidates to be placed under the protection of the Secret Service .

With Kennedy's death, Vice President Humphrey was de facto established as the Democratic candidate, especially since Kennedy's delegates were unable to unanimously stand behind one of Humphrey's competitors. At the nomination convention from August 26th to 29th, Humphrey secured 1,759 delegate votes, while McCarthy received only 601 votes. However, the official nomination at the Chicago party conference was overshadowed by serious clashes between militant anti-Vietnamese opponents and the police, who acted extremely hard on the instructions of Mayor Richard J. Daley . Humphrey chose Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate .

republican

Nixon with his victory sign during the election campaign, 1968

The Republican Party nominated Richard Nixon , who was considered a favorite from the start, but also profited from the weakness and indecision of his opponents, who either broke off their primary campaign early (like George W. Romney , Michigan governor , who because of his claim, he had been " brainwashed " by the US military in Vietnam , was heavily criticized and ridiculed), hesitated too long with your candidacy (like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ) or only pursued it half-heartedly (like California Governor Ronald Reagan ) . The candidate for the office of vice president was the governor of Maryland Spiro Agnew .

Others

The American Independent Party nominated Alabama's Governor George Wallace and Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay for Vice President , who proposed the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Charlene Mitchell ran for president of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) . This made the CPUSA the first American party to ever nominate a woman and an African-American person for the presidency.

Election campaign

Results by counties

The dominant themes in the election campaign were the Vietnam War , the increasing violence in American society, the brutal riots during the Democratic Party Congress and, last but not least, the violent death of Robert F. Kennedy . Nixon began his campaign with a large lead in the opinion polls, but this shrank noticeably as Humphrey increasingly emancipated himself from Johnson and Johnson also ordered a final stop to the bombing of North Vietnam on October 31, six days before the election.

Ultimately, however, Nixon prevailed with his appeal to the “great silent majority” of Americans, the promise to see to a “return to normalcy” and the claim that they had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam conflict. George Wallace's candidacy remained a major factor of uncertainty until the end , as it was not clear which of the two top candidates would cost more votes. In addition, with a strong performance by Wallace and a close race between Nixon and Humphrey, it seemed questionable whether a candidate would be able to win an absolute majority of the electors. Otherwise the House of Representatives (as in 1824 ) would have had to elect the President. At that time, the Democratic Party had a clear majority in the Congress Chamber.

There was a discrepancy between the electoral vote and the election result, as Lloyd W. Bailey , who was elected in North Carolina as the elector for Richard Nixon, cast his vote for George Wallace instead of Nixon, who instead of the originally in Alabama , Arkansas , Georgia , Louisiana and Mississippi won 45 electors and received 46 Electoral College votes .

Result

candidate	Political party	be right		electors
		number	percent
Richard Nixon	republican	31,785,148	43.4%	301
Hubert Humphrey	democrat	31,274,503	42.7%	191
George Wallace	American Independent	9.901.151	13.5%	46
Henning Blomen	laboratory	approx. 30,000	0.07%	-
Other		approx. 200,000	0.4%	-
total		73.199.998	100%	538

270 votes were necessary for the election to the president.

literature

• Michael Schumacher: The Contest: The 1968 Election and the War for America's Soul. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 2018, ISBN 978-1-4529-5731-9 .
• Michael A. Cohen: American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division. Oxford University, Oxford 2016, ISBN 978-0-19-977756-3 .
• Michael Nelson: Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence 2014, ISBN 978-0-7006-1963-4 .
• Lewis L. Gould: 1968: The Election That Changed America. Second edition (first edition 1993). Ivan R. Dee, Chicago 2010, ISBN 978-1-56663-862-3 .
• Donald Richard Deskins, Hanes Walton, Sherman C. Puckett: Presidential Elections, 1789-2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2010, ISBN 978-0-472-11697-3 , pp. 438-448 (= Chapter 48: Richard M. Nixon's Initial Election. ).

Web links

Commons : 1968 US Presidential Election  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mel Ayton: The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Potomac Books, Washington DC 2007, pp. 38-47
2. ↑ http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/1209/120997.opin.column.1.html