Did The 26th Amendment Fail? Part 2; George McGovern's Doomed 1972 Presidential Run

 

In a sense George McGovern had been running for the 1972 Democratic Nomination from the moment Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. He had agreed to take up the doomed mantle of his campaign at the disastrous 1968 Convention in Chicago and the narrow victory of Richard Nixon and the continued fighting in Vietnam had been pushing him forward ever since.

He had been the leading figure of Theodore White called the Movement of the New Left, the head of a commission to make presidential primaries fairer and more accurate in the lead up to the 1972 race for the nomination. The commission had decided to make rules that blacks be included in the process – and essentially this came to include all minority groups, including women and youth. As White points out at the time women were more than half the population and youth was a transitional biological state that is difficult to define. Nevertheless the commission came back with the recommendation to ‘encourage…representation of minority groups on national convention delegates in reasonable relationship to the groups presence in the population of the states.” There was no definition of what ‘reasonable’ meant and at the time, many believed this could do more damage to the party then benefit.

White argues that this convention representing a redefinition of what ‘liberal meant and how this may have become one of the biggest obstacle the Democrats have faced for the last half century:

“No man must be locked into or hammered into a category from which he has no opportunity to escape. He must not be locked in by the color of his skin or his racial genes; he must not be locked in by lack of educational opportunity; he must not be locked in by birth, or parentage, or age or poverty.

The quota idea was a wrench from this position. It set up stark categories within the political process; and the voters must,, whether they will or not, confirm those categories in selecting representatives. By setting up such categories and ignoring other categories, it inevitably excluded as well as included.

In an indirect fashion the 1972 election may have led to launch of what is now called identity politics. It also argued how liberalism had shifted towards morality and statistics and represented the time they went from the academic world, leaving matters to pragmatic politicians turning their values into programs of action into arguing these programs themselves had values. As a result critical elements of the Democratic coalition since the Great Depression – particularly labor and was ignoring how cities, the beneficiaries of so many moral programs, were suffering urban decay.

McGovern had been considering announcing for the Presidency earlier than he did and White met with him in 1970. McGovern spent the majority of his meeting talking about his plans to run, who he would face and how he intended to get the nomination. White had no recollection of any  themes of the larger campaign; it was essentially earn the nomination first; then move to issues. McGovern’s campaign decided early on that ‘they would have to consolidate the left wing’ which meant seizing control of the movement and not for a moment questioning any single one of his premises.

By 1970 it was becoming clear what the movement was capable of leading to victory – and what they would do if they were crossed. They were capable of taking over organizations but almost from the start they had no electoral power. They tried to primary long time conservative Democrat Senator Henry Jackson in Washington; he beat their candidate 7-to-1. Democratic peace candidates constantly underperformed in heavily Democratic districts: the initial victories of Ronald Dellums in Berkeley and Bella Abzug in New York ran as much as twenty points behind traditional Democrats. A pattern was becoming clear: the movement could win primaries but when they ran in general elections they underperformed. This lesson was ignored by the Movement in 1970 and continued to be ignored in McGovern’s campaign.

Political scholars would attempt to redeem McGovern’s disastrous run for the White House by arguing he had laid the groundwork for the coalition that Barack Obama would win the White House in 2008. In reality McGovern’s campaign, certainly at the primary level, bares a far closer resemblance to the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Both campaigns did far better in caucus states rather than primaries; both did better in smaller states than the larger urban ones that were key to winning elections and both were supported primarily by a similar coalition, critically college educated and given the nature of the wins in the caucuses, primarily white. The fact that McGovern managed to win the Democratic nomination and Sanders failed to do so speaks less to McGovern’s ability as a campaigner – and far more to the limited number of primaries there were.

McGovern’s first ‘victory’ was in New Hampshire where he outperformed expectations against Edmund Muskie the favorite for the nomination. He didn’t win a primary until Wisconsin when he managed to get 30 percent of the vote and as a result 54 delegates. On April 20^th he had a sweeping victories in the Massachusetts primary – the only state he carried in the general election.

There were troubling patterns for McGovern’s run throughout the primary campaign. The first which McGovern and his acolytes chose to ignore was his horrible performance in the South. By and large he bypassed those primaries and left them to George Wallace to sweep, which he did, taking Tennessee, North Carolina and Maryland as well as trouncing the competition in Florida.

The second and far more troubling one was how poorly the McGovern campaign performed in the larger states. McGovern got less than six percent in Florida, stayed out of Illinois (which Muskie swept), finished a distant third in Pennsylvania behind Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, narrowly lost Ohio to Humphrey and was utterly flatten in Michigan by George Wallace. The McGovern campaign would only narrowly prevail in California and only took New York because they were unopposed.

Tellingly it was not until he obtained front-runner status in the media’s eyes after his victory in Wisconsin that they began to consider what their platform was. It is worth noting that McGovern had attended Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party Convention in 1948 and in a way that heavy left-wing ideology never left him. He had recruited much of his army from the young of college campuses as well as the most extreme parts of the left. He knew this values were not believed by the majority of Americans and in fact he didn’t hold with them much himself. But because of the tactics of his campaign he believed he had to pursue them.

This methodology led to McGovern becoming immensely popular with the anti-war movement and the young who might well have considered them the only politician who shared their values. That he was not, in fact, the candidate of the ‘three A’s’ – amnesty, abortion and acid was something that his young followers chose to nevertheless assume he was. “On the college campuses,” White wrote, “within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the pass.” Indeed White was reminded far more of Barry Goldwater than Bobby Kennedy in McGovern’s rhetoric.

This rhetoric, it should be mentioned, didn’t play with the vast majority of Democratic primary voters: McGovern earned a total of slightly more than 4 million votes, a quarter of all those cast – and actually fewer than Hubert Humphrey’s failed run. Where the McGovern campaign, like Goldwater’s in 1964, was superior was at grass roots organizing. By May 16^th he was running a distant third behind not only Humphrey but George Wallace in votes cast. But his campaigners were far better at organizing than any other Democratic running. The day Wallace was eliminated because of attempt on his life, he had accumulated over 3.3 million votes and yet only 321 delegates. McGovern at that same point had accumulate 2.1 million votes but had 560 delegates. The bosses might not want McGovern to be their nominee and there was a considerable argument that the Democratic primary voter didn’t feel that way but his campaign had made sure McGovern was going to be the nominee and anyone who didn’t like it could out of the way.

With the insurgency completed at the Miami Convention, McGovern’s campaign did what all revolutionaries do: execute the old guard and replace them with loyalists. That those same people were the ones the campaign was going to need to win in November seemed never to cross the McGovernites mind: there never seemed to be a question that the voters in the states that had rejected them in places like Michigan or Florida in the primary wouldn’t come out for them in the general. And they made sure to have the winners have the best seats at the convention even though the people watching at home might well be wondering where the people they had voted for in other elections across the country were and who all these young strangers were.  The fact that they chose to spend the period nominating Archie Bunker and Mao for Vice President before agreeing on Thomas Eagleton might not have been a great look either. And tellingly they made sure that the man they had gone out of their way to be the face of their movement couldn’t give the address introducing him to the nation and making clear of his own views until 3:00 AM when most of America was asleep. The nomination of McGovern was their night, not the candidate’s.

And the McGovern campaign was never able to parent the children that were the critical part of the family. The establishment was trying to stop McGovern campaign even at Miami and while the grownups were trying to handle it, the children in the delegations screamed: “Why aren’t you listening to us!?”  This played out in a seating delegation at South Carolina which the McGovernites planned to lose in order to make sure the vote to ensure they controlled the California delegation was won, This was a necessary and morally right decision for the McGovern campaign, who no doubt fought they would lose this battle but win the war which would help women long term. The Women’s Caucus, however, saw this as the equivalent of a sign of moral bankruptcy and considered this a reason McGovern was this greatest of sins “just another politician”

McGovern himself was the perfect parent for this generation: basically absent from the decision making process and too generous to tell his children how ridiculous their thinking was and how it would hurt his own chances in November. The platform was the most left-wing in Democratic Party history to that point and many Democrats, never mind the American people, thought it was out of touch. But in what has essentially become a tradition for all identity politics going forward, the McGovernites decided what was best for them was best for the nation. The disastrous decision to nominate Thomas Eagleton for Vice President and everything that unfolded afterward are considered the nail in the coffin of McGovern’s hopes for the Presidency; in truth they were likely dead and buried before his nomination occurred.

The Dallas rally that began the McGovern campaign was symbolic of what was to come. McGovern knew that in order to win the general he had to ‘de-radicalize’ his image. The crowd at the rally – one of the most favorable witnessed by White -  however was the same group as before – “young people…with the look, many of them, of students. But there were no blacks in this group and there were few Latin-Americans.” Neither were any major Democrats from Texas at the state of local level.”

This was the pattern throughout McGovern’s fall campaign: the only people who really seemed enthusiastic about McGovern were the people who’d already voted for him. Unions, a major Democratic stronghold since the New Deal, was not happy with his platform: they had little use for amnesty or the various ideas for welfare. McGovern’s campaign strategy was incoherent, and the strategy of the candidate was completely out of touch with those of his campaign headquarters. It was run with no clear leader and eventually the headquarters themselves became filthy, staffed by insulting volunteers who saw no shame in using obscenities towards Democratic state officials. They had no knowledge of how the Democratic Party worked and looked at allies of JFK as ‘one of those 1960 Freaks.” It was a campaign run by McGovernites and among them there were almost no African-Americans and no women. And the command was guilty of the kind of delusion that has plagued leftists for the next fifty years: they mistook their victories in the primary for the general and never made any attempt to win over those who had voted for their opponents – especially the working-class voter that was increasingly moving to the right. “It became a campaign,” one McGovernite said later on. “which couldn’t understand its own votes.

And the Democratic Party, almost to a man, decided to do the only thing possible: concentrate on saving themselves at a national and state level and let the McGovern campaign go down to a disastrous defeat. Which is exactly what happened. Richard Nixon won reelection by the largest mandate in political history to that point, getting more than sixty percent of the popular vote and carrying every state in the Union except for Massachusetts and DC.

By contrast while the Democrats suffered some losses in the House, they maintained their majority by a significant margin and actually gained two seats in the Senate. This included flipping seats in such Republican strongholds as Maine and South Dakota where such longtime Republicans as Margaret Chase Smith and Karl Mundt were defeated  as well as narrow victories in states like Delaware where two term incumbent Caleb Boggs lost to a twenty-nine year old named Joe Biden. While Nixon’s largest electoral victories by far were in the South by and large the states with his biggest margins including Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia, saw no changes in their makeup. Nixon would carry states such as Illinois and Texas by huge numbers but in both states Democratic governors held on to power. Nixon’s landslide was one of the emptiest in electoral history on almost every level. The McGovernites had managed to defeat the establishment by nominating their candidate and across the board Democrats were find with the establishment and McGovern was the problem.

For all the arguments of the kind of coalition McGovern had built that would later come to be critical for Obama – the Latino vote, the working women and what was called the gay vote at the time – one contingency he didn’t carry was the newly enfranchised 18-21 year olds less than half of those newly enfranchised by the 26^th amendment and the anecdotal evidence is that they fundamentally split their vote evenly between Nixon and McGovern. Sadly this figure represents the high-water mark for that demographic. By and large for the rest of the century it was all downhill from there.

In the next article in this series I will look as to how this particular demographic as well as the left in general reacted to Nixon’s resignation and how their relative electoral inactivity might well be sited as a major factor in the conservative movement that began its own rise ever since.