Presidential Election of 1968

THE 1968 PRESIDENTIAL election was an important turning point for both the Democratic and Republican parties. In the general election, former Vice President Richard M. Nixon won the first of his two terms, defeating Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, with Alabama Governor George C. Wallace as a significant third-party candidate.

At the start of the year, the race appeared to belong to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. A Democrat from Texas, Johnson had won with one of the largest landslides in American history in 1964. The United States was successfully engaged in a large-scale effort against poverty and in favor of civil rights for African Americans and others. The country was also fighting a war in Vietnam. It is generally believed that war is good for an incumbent president, because many people who would ordinarily vote for a challenger will vote for the incumbent out of patriotism. This suggests that Johnson could have counted on many Republican votes. However, before Johnson could appeal to Republicans or anyone else in the general election, he had to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Winning the party nomination is ordinarily no contest for an incumbent president, however, opposition to the war had been building among Democratic activists since mid-1967, a time of urban unrest and growing agitation among young people who were subject to the military draft.

Democratic Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota challenged Johnson's position on the war, and he did very well in the critical first primary election, in New Hampshire. Johnson won the primary handily, taking 49 percent as a write-in candidate, but as an incumbent president, he expected nothing more than [Page 643]token opposition. He found McCarthy's 42 percent of the vote to be humiliating, and he expected there would be worse to come for him in subsequent primaries. The Vietnam War was not going well, with a major offensive by the enemy leading to record American casualties in the first quarter of 1968. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced in a televised address to the nation that he would not seek another term. The officially stated reason was that he wanted to devote all of his remaining energies to winning the war.