The unexpected resonances of a dreary presidential campaign
Lately I find myself thinking about the presidential election of 1972. This is admittedly odd, not only because it was not an especially interesting contest but even more so because it seems about as irrelevant to the presidential election of 2024 as can be imagined. And yet, there is a way in which Donald Trump really does seem to resemble Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota: in the way party control can be a bad sign.
Back in 1972 President Richard Nixon was running for re-election. He had won the presidency four years earlier in a tumultuous campaign in which Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson decided not run again because of protests over the Vietnam War and subsequent front-runner Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Democratic National Convention of 1968 was a riotous fiasco, out of which Vice-President Hubert Humphrey emerged as the hobbled nominee (former Alabama governor George Wallace would win five states and over thirteen percent of the vote). And yet despite this, the election proved to be excitingly close.
Not 1972. Nixon was doing everything in his power—legal and otherwise—to nail down a re-election that seemed inevitable months before it actually happened. His dramatic diplomatic opening with China that summer was only one move in that direction. (That Nixon, a fierce anti-communist, had counter-intuitively been able to do this spawned a political proverb: “Only Nixon could go to China.”) He had also imposed wage-and-price controls to delay a rising tide of inflation that would afflict the nation by mid-decade, and was engaged in a low-profile campaign to harass those who landed on his infamous “enemies list.” The general election was widely regarded as a bore. Turnout was historically low.
The Democratic primary process, however, was quite intriguing. In the aftermath of the 1968 disaster the party embarked on a series of reforms to make the process more, well, democratic. The party leaders charged with this task, colloquially known as the McGovern Commission (it was also led by Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser) basically set up the primary process that has been with us ever since: caucuses, primaries, delegates, and the like. Many of these elements had already been part of the political system, but they were codified as never before, and power was taken out of the hands of behind-the-scenes pols and given more to voters, with the result that nominees were usually known long before the Democratic (and, a few years later, the Republican) Conventions. Though this system has been eroding—as in the dethronement of New Hampshire by Democrats in 2024—it remains the framework in which presidential elections take place.
Senator McGovern—an unusually decent World War II veteran with a strong humanitarian bent—had first tentatively run for president in 1968 as a stand-in for Robert Kennedy. He didn’t get far, but he established a presidential campaign operation the following year led by a promising young Democrat named Gary Hart. (Another promising young politician-in-the-making, Bill Clinton, led the McGovern operation in Texas.) The campaign’s mastery of the new machinery led him to prevail over more established—and centrist—Democrats like Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, brought down in a Nixon-engineered PR disaster in which it appeared Muskie cried over attacks on his wife (the incident took place in the middle of a snowstorm, so it was hard to tell). Though there was a lot of grumbling among party insiders, McGovern won the contest fair and square, and became the party’s nominee.
The problem was that the McGovern campaign was perceived to be far to the left of the electorate. It was strongly associated with young people; the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1971, gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, and some believed youth would be a real electoral factor. McGovern staked out liberal positions on a number of issues, especially the Vietnam War—he argued that draft dodgers should be exonerated. Republican operatives summarized (in truth, exaggerated) the Democratic campaign as “abortion, amnesty, and acid.” A parade of counterculture celebrity McGovernites like Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand were not finally helpful. The general election was an electoral wipeout; Nixon defeated McGovern by a 62%-38% margin, leaving McGovern with only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. But a timebomb in the form of the Watergate break-in of June 1972 would ultimately bring down Nixon, leading to the smug Massachusetts bumper sticker Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern.
Donald Trump is no George McGovern, and in any number of ways, among them moral character and his relative strength as a presidential candidate. But Trump too is presiding over a party that has been remade in his image—including a series of rules changes in his favor—and one that espouses positions on controversies like abortion (some things never change) and foreign policy that are significantly outside the political mainstream. As McGovern did, Trump hedges at times. Nevertheless, he commands a fervent base of support that will stick with him through thick and thin.
But that base, while significant, is still short of an electoral majority, and Trump is running a campaign that doubles down on it rather than trying to expand it. President Joe Biden (who began his career in politics by successfully running for Senate himself in 1972) excites nobody, but he’s less repellent than Trump. In that regard, he’s like Nixon, who—despite having been cordially hated by many Americans for a generation by 1972—seemed like a safer, saner choice than McGovern (like Nixon did, Biden is also moving to the middle, in his case on immigration). As a matter of electoral math, it seems like there’s a pretty good case for believing that in the end Biden can soundly defeat Trump. In 2016, Trump represented a challenge to the status quo on which some people were willing to take a chance. Eight years later, he’s well known as a chaos agent who threatens to be far worse than last time. He commands passionate Republican support, but that support, like Democratic support in 1972, is less than representative of majority opinion.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Trump will lose. Or, more troubling, that he will respect such an outcome; his contempt for democracy is open, unlike Nixon’s, whose subterfuge was meant to be secret. But history is a useful guide for reminding us that even the most unique situations can have familiar, if ironic, cadences. And those cadences furnish a basis for hope.
Jim Cullen teaches at Greenwich Country Day school. His latest book is the third revised and updated edition of Born in the U.S.A: Bruce Springsteen in American Life.