RFK vs. Nixon, 1968

[gorkay]

Bobby would have won handily. Humphrey did not have the nomination sewn up when Kennedy was still alive. Many in the party rank and file, and in the party leadership, were unhappy with the prospect of a Humphrey candidacy because the polls in the summer of '68 showed him losing to Nixon badly. A movement was already underway among some of the party bosses, including Mayor Daley, to swing the nomination to RFK. Of course, the movement died when Kennedy did, and the party was left with virtually no alternative to Humphrey. The bosses didn't trust McCarthy and thought he would be a weak candidate in the general election. If Kennedy had still been around, the movement would still have been alive, and I think it would have succeeded, mainly because Kennedy was so obviously the Dems' strongest candidate. It would have been a hard sell to Humphrey and Johnson, but if they didn't have the votes, there wouldn't have been anything they could do about it. It would have been interesting to see what attitude they would have taken towards Kennedy as their party's nominee.

In 1968, the war was the overriding issue, and it is not true that an overwhelming majority of the voters supported it. The country was deeply divided with an almost infinite gradation of opinion about it-- everything from the extreme hawks who wanted to bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age to to the extreme doves who wanted to pull all the troops out immediately, and all shades in between. Why would Nixon have taken as dovish a position on the war, and how could he have won, if most voters supported our involvement? His position, in fact, wasn't all that different from RFK's (except that Kennedy meant it, while Nixon didn't). So the advantage Nixon had in comparing his war stance to the failures of Johnson and Humphrey would have been negated. And also remember that the American public's love for all things Kennedy was perhaps at its peak in 1968, before Chappaquiddick and before JFK's philandering was widely known.