Presidential campaign strategies and political dynamics

1968 Presidential Election

ANALYSIS of the SITUATION GOING INTO the 1968 CAMPAIGN, which effected the campaign and candidates: The 1968 Presidential Campaign took place at a time in American history when there was constant turmoil on a number of fronts.

There were a militant and frequently violent student demonstrations against the Vietnam War but there were also hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrations against the war (with middle class people involved).

And there had recently been big city riots caused by angry blacks (living in Newark, Watts, Detroit, Los Angeles, and many more) who were impatient for social justice and decent jobs and frustrated that their leader Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated and that southern blacks were on TV being beaten, attacked by dogs, and sprayed with high-pressure hoses in Alabama.

Millions of young men were angry that they could be drafted and sent to Vietnam at the age of 18, but they couldn't vote for the politicians who were making decisions about going to war until you were 21 years old. That was a paradox that stirred youthful emotions.

Many college campuses were shut down (like San Francisco State, and Kent State in Ohio among many others) because hundreds of thousands of students demanded and end to the war.

Along with the Civil Rights movement, the radical Black Panther movement, the hippie movement, the anti-war movement, there was constant turmoil and chaos in the streets of American cities.

ISSUES of the CAMPAIGN: (Democratic Candidates) the main 1968 campaign issues - reviewed in the two previous paragraphs - boiled down to the Vietnam war, "law and order," and social justice. The Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was very unpopular because of Vietnam. He dropped out of the campaign after the first primary. Senator Eugene McCarthy was a strong candidate early in the campaign; he appeared to be a pied piper for the young who were "anti-establishment" and anti-war.

Bobby Kennedy was a strong candidate among young people, African-Americans, and Roman Catholics, until he was assassinated in June 1968. Kennedy was an attractive man who campaigned for civil rights, an end to the war, and for jobs for the unemployed. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's VP, announced his candidacy shortly after Johnson stepped down, and won the nomination during the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Humphrey chose senator Edmund Muskie as is VP running mate.

ISSUES of the CAMPAIGN (Republican Candidates) New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ran in the primaries as a dove (anti-Vietnam) but Richard Nixon easily defeated him. George Romney also ran as a peace candidate, and was soundly beaten. California Governor Ronald Reagan also challenged Nixon, but not as a peace candidate, on the contrary Reagan talked tough on law and order in the streets. Nixon won the nomination and chose Spiro Agnew as his running mate.

American Independent Party) Segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for president on a conservative platform; he did not seriously challenge the major parties, but he did get a lot of votes in primaries by appealing to racist and conservatives who were upset at blacks' demands in the Civil Rights Movement, at the "Black Power" movement (Black Panthers) and at increasingly loud and violent anti-Vietnam demonstrations.