If George McGovern was the nominee in 1976 instead of 1972
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  If George McGovern was the nominee in 1976 instead of 1972
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Author Topic: If George McGovern was the nominee in 1976 instead of 1972  (Read 611 times)
Sir Mohamed
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« on: May 11, 2020, 11:29:23 AM »

If Edmund Muskie was the losing nominee against Nixon in 1972 and McGovern got nominated in 1976 instead, what would have happened? This assumes anything else doesn't change: Muskie gets blown out, Watergate happens and Ford replaces Nixon in 1974, the GOP loses the midterms, Saigon falls to the communists and Ford barely survives a primary challenge from Mr. Raygun.
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KaiserDave
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« Reply #1 on: May 11, 2020, 11:30:34 AM »

Ford wins, not in a landslide, but he wins.
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Snazzrazz Mazzlejazz
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« Reply #2 on: May 11, 2020, 04:28:37 PM »

The election would be a tossup but I'd say it leans very slightly towards McGovern assuming there's no Eagleton affair equivalent.
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Alben Barkley
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« Reply #3 on: May 11, 2020, 07:14:16 PM »
« Edited: May 11, 2020, 07:24:18 PM by Andy Beshear’s Campaign Manager »

The election would be a tossup but I'd say it leans very slightly towards McGovern assuming there's no Eagleton affair equivalent.

No way. McGovern wasn't blown out because of the Eagleton incident. He was blown out because he was seen as a left-wing extremist. That wouldn't change in 1976. Yes, he'd do better than he did in 1972 because of Watergate. But he still wouldn't win. Ford was seen as moderate and likable compared to Nixon. And he came pretty close to winning even against the also moderate and likable Carter, despite Watergate and the Nixon pardon. He would easily beat McGovern, who to the eyes of most of the public was neither moderate nor likable. It would have been a terrible idea for the Dems to nominate him; would have blown their best chance at winning an election in over a decade.

Remember that Carter was able to win by taking back the South for the Democrats. He was uniquely suited to doing that for obvious reasons, and even still outside of Georgia most of the South was relatively close -- he barely won Mississippi and lost Virginia, for example. And he didn't even do as well in Georgia or other Southern states he handily won as Nixon did in 1972. McGovern would have had no chance whatsoever of winning the South. You might say he would do a bit better in the West. Maybe, but it wouldn't be anywhere near enough to win. Here's the best map I can see for him:



Which still comes out to:

Ford: 341
McGovern: 197

And honestly, I'm not even sure he would win all that. Basically I just looked at the states where McGovern did least horribly in 1972 and where Ford did worst in 1976 (excluding Southern states), or where Carter actually underperformed McGovern relative to the national vote, and tried to come up with a reasonable average of how he might have done based on that. It's still not pretty for McGovern.
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President Punxsutawney Phil
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« Reply #4 on: May 11, 2020, 07:15:59 PM »

Yeah I don't see McGovern winning.
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brucejoel99
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« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2020, 11:11:36 PM »

If McGovern doesn't run in 1972, then some other farther-left Democrat will. Anti-war sentiment was very strong among non-Southern Democrats in 1972, & delegate selection rules had been drastically reformed to reduce the dominance of traditional party insiders. This process had gone so far that the convention expelled the entire Daley-led Illinois delegation because there weren't enough black & female delegates, & instead seated a delegation of liberal reformers that was actually far less representative of Illinois Democrats than even Daley's group.

The McGovernite leftists believed that their views would carry the day in November, that America was truly ripe for a truly "progressive" political program; but, like the Goldwaterites in 1964, they'd overreached & lost big time. By 1976, the Democrats were less interested in ideological purity than winning. Carter was a near-ideal candidate: somebody who could win back the once-Solid South & appeal to evangelical Christian voters while retaining the votes of liberals & blacks.

So yeah, McGovern would fail.
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Chester County Anti-populist
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« Reply #6 on: May 12, 2020, 11:25:20 AM »

Mcgovern would have lost horribly.
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President Johnson
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« Reply #7 on: May 12, 2020, 02:49:05 PM »

McGovern was a weak candidate and would not have carried much states in the South. Ford wins comfortably. McGovern may have done a little better on the West coast than Carter did.



✓ President Gerald R. Ford (R-MI)/Senator Robert J. Dole (R-KS): 324 EV. (50.87%)
Senator George S. McGovern (D-SD)/Governor Milton Shapp (D-PA): 214 EV. (46.34%)
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MIKESOWELL
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« Reply #8 on: May 12, 2020, 08:05:28 PM »

McGovern loses by at least 100 electoral votes and by 5-6 points in the popular vote.
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mianfei
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« Reply #9 on: October 23, 2020, 03:37:49 AM »
« Edited: October 27, 2020, 06:28:48 AM by mianfei »

If McGovern doesn't run in 1972, then some other farther-left Democrat will. Anti-war sentiment was very strong among non-Southern Democrats in 1972, and delegate selection rules had been drastically reformed to reduce the dominance of traditional party insiders. This process had gone so far that the convention expelled the entire Daley-led Illinois delegation because there weren't enough black & female delegates, and instead seated a delegation of liberal reformers that was actually far less representative of Illinois Democrats than even Daley's group.

The McGovernite leftists believed that their views would carry the day in November, that America was truly ripe for a truly "progressive" political program; but, like the Goldwaterites in 1964, they'd overreached & lost big time. By 1976, the Democrats were less interested in ideological purity than winning.
Your point is very good. The Democratic Party outside the South wanted a radical antiwar program but the voting public, and perhaps even the nonvoting public, found it too extreme.

It is just to criticize the Democratic Party’s identity politics because of its failure to improve living standards for blacks and other non-whites, and even for lower- and middle-class whites.

However, the hostility of white working-class and petit-bourgeois America to any law giving non-whites equality is such that winning them means rejecting – and maybe even overturning – all civil rights laws. This illustrative post from Laurence Auster is extreme right but undoubtedly represents the deep-felt opinion of many, if not most, rural white Americans (more than even Auster realizes). Opinion polls from the middle 1960s suggest that white American citizens, if required to vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would have opposed it by six- or seven-to-one. Outside academic and political elites, white Americans probably opposed the Civil Rights Act by thirty- or forty-to-one!

Growing inequality and uniquely high incarceration rates place the Democratic policy of winning at all costs in a bad light. At presidential level, it failed even at its goal, although elsewhere it succeeded until generational turnover in the middle to late 1990s.

If the Democratic Party had maintained its concern with a pure ideology so hostile to essential voting blocs, it would have faced decades in the presidential wilderness and erosion of its legislative base at a much earlier date. Moreover, a Republican Party that achieved hegemony outside the Northeast and Hawaii would no doubt repeal civil rights gains from as far back as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments if it could.
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