Presidential election in the United States in 1972

‹  1968  •   •  1976 ›
47th presidential election
November 7, 1972
			Republican Party
			Richard Nixon / Spiro Agnew
			electors					520
			be right				47.168.710
									60.7%
			Democratic Party
			George McGovern / Sargent Shriver
			electors					17th
			be right				29.173.222
									37.5%
Election results by state
49 states   Nixon / Agnew						1 state + DC   McGovern / Shriver
President of the United States
Before the election Richard Nixon Republican Party						Elected Richard Nixon Republican Party

The 47th election of the President of the United States of America took place on November 7, 1972 . Richard Nixon was able to win his re-election against the Democrat George McGovern and thus remained 37th President of the USA. The re-election of Nixon was the highest victory that Republicans could ever win in the US presidential election in relation to the votes cast. In the 1984 election , Ronald Reagan was able to surpass the election result.

Candidates

Richard Nixon

George McGovern

republican

The Republican Party nominated incumbent Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew as candidates for the vice presidency. At the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach , President Nixon received 1,323 of 1,324 votes; only one delegate from New Mexico voted for the Liberal Congressman Pete McCloskey from California . Otherwise, only John M. Ashbrook , a conservative member of Congress from Ohio , had seriously applied for the Republican nomination, but was clearly defeated by Nixon in the primary.

Democrats

In the course of an internal party reform, the Democrats had significantly increased the number of primaries, so that from now on these became the determining factor in the selection of candidates and the power and influence of the regional “party bosses” decreased accordingly.

Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was nominated for President and Sargent Shriver for Vice President .

Shriver's nomination came after the original candidate Thomas Eagleton , a Senator from Missouri , had to withdraw his candidacy. It had become known that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy for depression . This made him ineligible as a potential candidate for high office in the public eye.

The politically far-left McGovern was originally considered an outsider, but benefited from the unexpected weakness of the 1968 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Edmund Muskie , whose image was created by the impression that he had burst into tears during a speech and was therefore not nervously robust enough for the presidency, had suffered serious damage. Ex-Vice President Hubert Humphrey , the Democratic presidential candidate from 1968, tried again. However, despite support from the trade unions and some primary victories, he failed because he was unable to contact younger voters because of his support for the Vietnam War at the time .

Another strong opponent, George Wallace , Governor of Alabama and superior primary winner in Florida , had to end his election campaign prematurely after he was critically injured in an assassination attempt and remained paralyzed as a result. Edward Kennedy , also a possible candidate, had already lost all chances in 1969 due to his questionable behavior in a car accident.

With Shirley Chisholm , an African American woman applied for the first time for one of the two big parties for the presidency; she achieved the fourth best result at the nomination convention after McGovern, Wallace and Henry M. Jackson .

The party congress was sometimes chaotic. McGovern was only able to give his nomination speech long after midnight - and thus largely without a TV audience.

Others

The broader field of candidates, who all had no chance, included John Hospers from the Libertarian Party , who surprisingly got an electoral vote from Virginia , as well as John G. Schmitz from the American Independent Party , Linda Jenness from the Socialist Workers Party , Gus Hall from the Communist Party and Benjamin Spock from the People's Party . None of these candidates played a role in the election campaign.

Election campaign

The election campaign between Nixon and McGovern became one of the most one-sided in recent American history.

While Nixon could point to a robust economy and a number of foreign policy successes, such as the resumption of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China , détente with the USSR and the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam , McGovern appeared to many Americans because of his support Immediate end of American engagement in Vietnam (including pardons for all conscientious objectors) and for liberal drug and abortion legislation and thus far too far left politically to be eligible for the White House. The Republicans attacked this satirizing with the campaign slogan “Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion” (German: “Amnesty, LSD and Abortion”).

He was also accused of a lack of political judgment and fickleness in relation to his original vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, whom he ultimately dropped after he became aware of his mental health problems, although only a few days earlier he had declared that he was "a thousand percent" behind him.

When various opinion polls increasingly signaled McGovern's lack of opportunities, numerous Democratic congressional, Senate and governor candidates who feared for their own election, distanced himself from him, which gradually caused him to lose support within the party. On election day, he only succeeded in winning the state of Massachusetts , with Nixon winning all of the other 49 states.

By contemporary political observers, McGovern's debacle, together with the similarly poor performance of the far-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater eight years earlier, was taken as an indication that the presidential elections in the USA could not be won by ideologically very exposed candidates. However, this thesis has been disproved since the clear election victory in 1980 of the declared conservative Ronald Reagan . The prevailing opinion today is that in 1972 Nixon was unlikely to have been beaten by any Democratic candidate, though the defeat was excessive due to a number of McGovern's political mistakes.

Result

candidate	Political party	be right		electors
		number	percent
Richard Nixon	republican	47.168.710	60.7%	520
George McGovern	democrat	29.173.222	37.5%	17th
John G. Hospers	Libertarian	3,674	<0.01%	1
John G. Schmitz	American Independent	1,100,868	1.4%	0
Linda Jenness	Socialist Workers	83,380	0.1%	0
Benjamin Spock	People's	78,759	0.1%	0
Other		135.414	0.2%	0
total		78.448.356	100%	538

Watergate burglary and "dirty tricks"

→ Main article : Watergate affair

On June 17, 1972, shortly after the end of the primaries, five men were found breaking into the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington , where they were attempting to install wiretapping. The break-in caused a considerable stir, as the question of possible backers naturally arose and these were suspected to be in the ranks of the political opponent, i.e. the Republicans. However, the investigative authorities initially failed to establish a direct connection between the burglars - who made use of their right to remain silent - and the committee for the re-election of the president or the White House itself, which is why the case quickly disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers and during the election campaign only played a minor role.

Only after Nixon's renewed election victory did newspaper research ( Washington Post ) and a Senate investigative committee reveal that the break-in was just part of a series of illegal activities by Nixon and his men, which led to impeachment proceedings against the President in 1974 however, precluded by his resignation.

In the course of this investigation, it was also revealed that the Republicans tried in 1972 by using so-called "dirty tricks" to influence the Democratic nomination process. For example, there were anonymous letters to a local newspaper in New Hampshire , in which, shortly before the local area code, it was claimed that the candidate Edmund Muskie - who was favored at the time - had made derogatory comments about the French-speaking minority (Canuc Letter) and that his wife was making use of it a vulgar language or actually have a drinking problem from employees of the Nixon camp. All of these claims were fictitious and only served the purpose of preventing a nomination as far as possible for Muskie, who was considered the most dangerous of the Democratic candidates.

As a result of these incidents, the legal existence of the 1972 election was occasionally questioned, but no official objection was made.

literature

• 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. 449-458 (= Chapter 49: Richard M. Nixon's Reelection. ).
• Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Terror in the Election Campaign. Heyne Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-453-40618-6 .

Web links

Commons : 1972 US Presidential Election  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Remarks

1. ^ Susan B. Hansen: The Politics of Sex: Public Opinion, Parties, and Presidential Elections. Routledge, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-415-87058-0 , p. 89 .