Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by McGovern/Shriver, Blue denotes those won by Nixon/Agnew. Light grey is the electoral vote for "John Hospers" by a Virginia "faithless elector". Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.

< 1968  1976 >
United States presidential election, 1972
7 November 1972
Party	Republican Party	Democratic Party
Home State	California	South Dakota
Running mate	Spiro Agnew	Sargent Shriver
Electoral Vote	520	17
States Carried	49	1+DC
Popular Vote	47,168,710	29,173,222
Percentage	60.7%	37.5%
Before Election Richard Nixon Republican Party	After Election Richard Nixon Republican Party

The United States presidential election of 1972 was waged on the issues of radicalism and the Vietnam War. The Democratic nomination was eventually won by George McGovern, who ran an anti-war crusade against incumbent President Richard M. Nixon, but was handicapped by his outsider status and having to fire his vice presidential candidate. Nixon, proclaiming that peace was at hand in Vietnam because of his policies, ridiculed McGovern as the radical candidate of "acid, amnesty and abortion." The election took place on November 7, 1972. Nixon won the election in a landslide, with a 23.2% margin of victory in the popular vote, the 2nd largest such margin in Presidential election history.

Nominations

Democratic Party nomination

• Democratic Candidates
• Shirley Chisholm, U.S. representative from New York
• Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General from Ohio
• Walter E. Fauntroy, U.S. delegate from District of Colombia
• Fred R. Harris, U.S. senator from Oklahoma
• Vance Hartke, U.S. senator from Indiana
• Wayne Hays, U.S. representative from Ohio
• Hubert Humphrey, U.S. senator from Minnesota, former vice president, and 1968 presidential nominee
• Henry “Scoop” Jackson, U.S. senator from Washington
• John Lindsay, Mayor of New York City
• Eugene McCarthy, former U.S. senator from Minnesota and candidate for the 1968 presidential nomination
• George McGovern, U.S. senator from South Dakota
• Wilbur Mills, U.S. representative from Arkansas
• Patsy T. Mink, U.S. representative from Hawaii
• Walter F. Mondale, U.S. senator from Minnesota
• Edmund Muskie, U.S. senator from Maine and 1968 vice presidential nominee
• Terry Sanford, former Governor of North Carolina
• George Wallace, governor of Alabama and 1968 American Independent Party presidential candidate
• Sam Yorty, Mayor of Los Angeles

Senate Majority Whip Ted Kennedy had been the favorite to win the 1972 nomination, but his hopes were derailed by his role in the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident. He was not a candidate.

The establishment favorite for the Democratic nomination was Ed Muskie, the moderate who acquitted himself well as the 1968 Democratic vice presidential candidate. In the New Hampshire primary, Muskie gave a speech to defend himself and his wife, Jane, against the claims of the Canuck Letter. The press reported that Muskie was crying during the speech, and this likely caused Muskie to do worse than expected in the primary, while McGovern came in a surprisingly-close second. McGovern now had the momentum, which was well orchestrated by his campaign manager, Gary Hart.

Alabama governor George Wallace, with his "outsider" image, did well in the South (he won every single county in the Florida primary) and among alienated and dissatisfied voters. What might have become a forceful campaign was cut short when Wallace was shot while campaigning, and left paralyzed in an assassination attempt by Arthur Bremer. Wallace did win the Maryland primary, but the shooting incident was effectively the end of his campaign.

In the end, McGovern succeeded in winning the nomination by winning primaries through grass-roots support in spite of establishment opposition. McGovern had led a commission to redesign the Democratic nomination system after the messy and confused nomination struggle and convention of 1968. The fundamental principle of the McGovern Commission—that the Democratic primaries should determine the winner of the Democratic nomination—lasted throughout every subsequent nomination contest. However, the new rules angered many prominent Democrats whose influence was marginalized, and those politicians refused to support McGovern's campaign (some even supporting Nixon instead), leaving the McGovern campaign at a significant disadvantage in funding compared to Nixon.

Candidates gallery

Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York	former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark of Ohio	Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma	Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana
Senator and former U.S. Vice President 'Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota	Senator and former DNC Chairman Henry M. Jackson of Washington	Mayor John Lindsay of New York City	former Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota
Senator George McGovern of South Dakota	Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas	Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii	Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota
Senator and 1968 vice-presidential nominee Edmund Muskie of Maine	former Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina	Governor George Wallace of Alabama

Democratic National Convention

The tally:

• *George McGovern 1864.95
• Henry “Scoop” Jackson 525
• George Wallace 381.7
• Shirley Chisholm 151.95
• Terry Sanford 77.5
• Hubert Humphrey 66.7
• Wilbur Mills 33.8
• Edmund Muskie 24.3
• Edward M. Kennedy 12.7
• Sam Yorty 10
• Wayne Hays 5
• John Lindsay 5
• Eugene McCarthy 2
• Walter Mondale 2
• Ramsey Clark, Walter Fauntroy, Fred Harris, Vance Hartke and Patsy Mink 1 each

The Eagleton affair and the Vice Presidency

As several of his former opponents refused the honor, McGovern chose Missouri Senator Thomas F. Eagleton as his running mate. With hundreds of delegates either actively supporting Nixon or angry at McGovern for one reason or another, the vote was chaotic, with at least three other candidates having their names put into nomination and votes scattered over 70 candidates. The tally:

• * Thomas F. Eagleton 1741.81
• Frances Farenthold 404.04
• Mike Gravel 225.38
• Endicott Peabody 107.26
• Clay Smothers 74
• Birch Bayh 62
• Peter Rodino 56.5
• Jimmy Carter 30
• Shirley Chisholm 20
• Moon Landrieu 18.5
• 69 others 276.49

The vice presidential balloting went on so long that McGovern and Eagleton were forced to make their acceptance speeches at around three in the morning, local time.

A couple of weeks after the convention ended, it was discovered that Eagleton had undergone psychiatric electroshock therapy for depression, and had concealed this information from McGovern. McGovern initially claimed that he would back Eagleton “1000%”, only to ask Eagleton to withdraw 3 days later. This perceived indecisiveness was disastrous for the McGovern campaign.

After a week in which six prominent Democrats publicly refused the VP nomination, Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to the Kennedys and former ambassador to France and head of the War on Poverty, finally said yes. He was officially nominated by a special session of the Democratic National Committee. By this time, McGovern's poll ratings had plunged from 41% to 24%.

The Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 covers McGovern's campaign to win the Democratic nomination.

Amnesty, Abortion and Acid

On April 25, 1972, George McGovern won the Massachusetts primary and journalist Bob Novak phoned Democratic politicians around the country, who agreed with his assessment that blue-collar workers voting for McGovern did not understand what he really stood for. On April 27, 1972 Novak reported in a column that an unnamed democratic senator had said of McGovern: "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America - Catholic middle America, in particular - finds this out, he’s dead." The label stuck and McGovern became known as the candidate of "amnesty, abortion and acid."[1][2]

Novak was accused of manufacturing the quote and to rebut the criticism, Novak took the senator to lunch after the campaign and asked whether he could identify him as the source but the senator said he would not allow his identity to be revealed.[3] "Oh, he had to run for re-election. The McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that," says Novak.[4]

On July 15, 2007, Novak disclosed on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Thomas Eagleton. Political analyst Bob Shrum says that Eagleton would never have been selected as McGovern's running mate if it had been known at the time that Eagleton was the source of the quote, Eagleton's electro-shock treatments would never have become an issue in the 1972 presidential campaign, and McGovern would have remained politically viable carrying perhaps eight to ten states against Richard Nixon in 1972.[5]

Republican Party nomination

• Republican Candidates
• John Ashbrook, United States representative from Ohio
• Pete McCloskey, a United States representative from California
• Richard Nixon, the incumbent president of the United States

Candidates gallery

Representative John Ashbrook of Ohio

Representative Pete McCloskey of California

President Richard Nixon of California

The primaries

Nixon was a popular incumbent president in 1972, riding a wave of peace and prosperity, as he seemed to have reached détente with China and Russia. He shrugged off the first glimmers of what, after the election, became the massive Watergate scandal.

Polls showed that Nixon had a strong lead. He was challenged by two minor candidates, liberal Pete McCloskey of California and conservative John Ashbrook of Ohio. McCloskey ran as an anti-war and anti-Nixon candidate, while Ashbrook opposed Nixon's détente policies towards the China and the Soviet Union. In the New Hampshire primary McCloskey's platform of peace garnered 11% of the vote to Nixon's 83%, with Ashbrook receiving 6%.

Nixon won 1323 of the 1324 delegates to the GOP convention, with McCloskey receiving the vote of one delegate from New Mexico.

Third parties

Perhaps the only major third party candidate in the 1972 elections, Conservative congressman John G. Schmitz of the American Party (the party on whose ballot George Wallace ran in 1968) was on the ballot in 32 states and received 1,099,482 popular votes. Unlike Wallace, however, he received no electoral votes at all. Schmitz would make news again in the late 1990s when his daughter, Mary Kay Letourneau, was arrested for statutory rape.

John Hospers of the newly-formed Libertarian Party was on the ballot only in Colorado and Washington and received only 3,573 popular votes. However, he did receive one electoral vote from Virginia from a Republican dissenter (see below).

Benjamin Spock was nominated by the People's Party, which was formed in 1971.

General election

Campaign

George McGovern ran on a platform of ending the Vietnam War and instituting guaranteed minimum incomes for the nation's poor. However, his campaign was greatly crippled because of the electro-shock therapy controversy involving his original running mate, and because his view on the primaries had alienated many powerful Democrats. With McGovern's presence weakened by these factors, the Republicans successfully portrayed him as a half-crazy radical, and McGovern suffered a landslide defeat of 61%–38% to Nixon. Nixon's percentage of the popular vote was only sightly less than Lyndon Johnson's record in the 1964 election, and his margin of victory was slightly larger. Nixon won a majority vote in 49 states (including McGovern's home state of South Dakota), with only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia voting for the challenger, resulting in an even-more-lopsided Electoral College tally.

Nixon ran a harsh campaign with an aggressive policy of keeping tabs on perceived enemies, and his campaign aides committed the Watergate burglary to steal Democratic Party information during the election. Nixon's level of personal involvement with the burglary was never clear, but his tactics during the later coverup would eventually destroy his public support and lead to his resignation. Also, Nixon's so-called "southern strategy" of reducing the pressure for school desegregation and otherwise restricting federal efforts on behalf of blacks had a powerful attraction to northern blue-collar workers as well as southerners.

The election was held on November 7th. This election had the lowest voter turnout for a presidential election since 1948, with only 55 percent of the electorate voting. Part of the steep drop from the previous elections can be explained by the ratification of the 26th Amendment which expanded the franchise to 18-year-olds.

Results

Presidential Candidate	Party	Home State	Popular Vote		Electoral Vote	Running Mate	Running Mate's Home State	Running Mate's Electoral Vote
			Count	Percentage
Richard Milhous Nixon	Republican	California	47,168,710	60.7%	520	Spiro Theodore Agnew	Maryland	520
George Stanley McGovern	Democratic	South Dakota	29,173,222	37.5%	17	Robert Sargent Shriver	Maryland	17
John G. Hospers	Libertarian	California	3,674	0.0%	1(a)	Theodora Nathan	Oregon	1(a)
John G. Schmitz	American	California	1,100,868	1.4%	0	Thomas J. Anderson	Tennessee	0
Linda Jenness	Socialist Workers	Georgia	83,380	0.1%	0	Andrew Pulley	Illinois	0
Benjamin Spock	People's	California	78,759	0.1%	0	Julius Hobson	District of Columbia	0
Other			135,414	0.2%	0	Other		0
Total			77,744,027	100.0%	538	Total		538
Needed to win					270	Needed to win		270

Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1972 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (August 7, 2005).

Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (August 7, 2005).

^(a)A Virginia faithless elector, Roger MacBride, though pledged to vote for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, instead voted for Libertarian John Hospers and Theodora Nathan.

Trivia

• Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Tonie Nathan became the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.
• From 1960 to the present day, this was the only Presidential election in which Minnesota voted for a Republican.
• After the Watergate Scandal, a bumper sticker from Massachusetts stated, "Don't Blame Me, I'm from Massachusetts."
• The 1972 election was the first in American history in which a Republican candidate carried every Southern state. Arkansas was the last Southern state to go Republican; prior to 1972, the Natural State was NOT carried by the Democrats only twice: 1872 (by Republican Ulysses S. Grant) and 1968 (by third-party candidate George Wallace). Nixon carried Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia in 1968, and Barry Goldwater carried Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina in 1964. All of Goldwater's states except South Carolina went to Wallace in 1968.
• Hunter S. Thompson's book "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" provides an informed and surreal insiders look at the year and campaigns working up to the election.

External links

• 1972 popular vote by counties
• 1972 popular vote by states
• 1972 popular vote by states (with bar graphs)

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