Election of 1972: The Nixon Landslide

Election Results:
Nixon/Agnew: 520 electoral votes, 47.1 million popular votes
McGovern/Shriver: 17 electoral votes, 29.1 million popular votes

Summary:
The first Nixon Administration approached the work of the government from a more liberal perspective than many within the Republican Party would have expected. Nixon, after all, was a former senator from California who made his name for going after suspected communists in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Nixon proved to be a more dynamic political figure than anyone would have expected in his failed 1960 presidential bid or his election in 1968. The new president went after recession and unemployment with his “Nixonomics,” a series of proactive government policies to remedy economic woes. These policies included price controls, wages controls, encouraging a minimum wage law, and running a deficit in order to encourage government investment in businesses. However, many of the problems that Nixon inherited from previous administrations remained and by the 1972 election were exacerbated by his liberal economic policies.

Richard Nixon went after a range of domestic policies that were more far reaching and ambitious than Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. These policies included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the implementation of the Philadelphia Plan to ensure that construction companies would hire qualified African American contractors, the desegregation of schools in the South, and a failed attempt at a comprehensive health care plan for Americans. As well, the Nixon administration encouraged more open relations with China with a presidential visit in 1971. Finally, the Nixon policy of “Vietnamization,” or the withdrawal of American troops in favor of South Vietnamese, was successful in getting troops home but a dismal failure in the war effort against Communist North Vietnam. In general, Nixon’s first term was met with a great deal of failure but no lack of imagination.

Several factors led to Nixon’s overwhelming success in the 1972 presidential election. The assassination attempt on George Wallace and his subsequent paralysis before the election left him unable to run for office and left the Southern states open to either major party. Nixon and other Republicans began what would become a GOP strategy to this day of poaching the “rust belt,” or the Southern states and the Western United States. In the 1972 election, all of Wallace’s electoral votes and much of his popular following went to the Republican Party.

As well, the Democratic Party’s disarray during the 1968 presidential election carried over into the 1972 nominating process. Reflecting a turn toward the left wing by the Democrats, an increasingly young liberal group of delegates nominated anti-war candidate George McGovern, a former senator from South Dakota. The 1972 election was in many ways similar to the dynamic in the 1964 election, in which Lyndon Johnson could play the moderate card because of the radical politics of Barry Goldwater. In this case, McGovern’s overtly liberal stances on the war and domestic issues allowed Nixon to lay low and play the moderate card in the election. The overwhelming popular and electoral vote victory for Nixon was his last success, as the Watergate scandal and resulting legal action marred Nixon’s legacy beyond 1972.