What Was the Major Factor That Led to the Democrats Loss of Power in 1968?

The 1968 presidential campaign was so traumatic that a mere timeline tin't come close to recapturing the feel of it.

The drama unfolded in several acts of staggering succession:

• The Tet Offensive, a ferocious assault by Communist soldiers on U.South. war machine forces in Vietnam

• President Lyndon Johnson's sudden decision to not run for re-ballot

• The assassinations of ceremonious rights crusader Dr. Martin Luther Rex, Jr. and Autonomous presidential contender Sen. Robert Kennedy

• Riots on the streets of Chicago at the Autonomous National Convention which left the party torn asunder

In the end, it was the candidate of conservatism and stability, Republican Richard Nixon, who was elected president.

The yr started with the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, where 500,000 U.S. troops were desperately trying to save the anti-communist government. The Communist armies lost an estimated 58,000 men, but scored a propaganda victory.

"It was a turning point in the state of war," said Johnson's secretary of defense, Clark Clifford. "Its size and scope made mockery of what the American war machine had told the public about the war, and devastated administration credibility."

In Tet'southward aftermath, Johnson struggled to build support for sending more troops to Vietnam.

Johnson's pessimism over war
"We need more taxes — in an election year," he told his generals on March 26, 1968. "We demand more than troops — in an election year. Nosotros need cuts in the domestic budget — in an ballot year. And even so I cannot tell the people what they will become in Vietnam in return for these cuts. We have no support for the state of war."

At that point in the war, virtually 20,000 U.South. soldiers had been killed. And nearly 500 were dying in combat every week.

In the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 12, Johnson faced anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who lone dared to claiming the president.

McCarthy won 42 pct of the vote, a humiliation for Johnson.

Four days later, Kennedy, some other opponent of the war, jumped in the race. Critics called him an opportunist.

Kennedy said he'd assured McCarthy "that my candidacy would not exist in opposition to his, but in harmony."

Simply just one man could end upwardly winning the nomination, and in the cease neither McCarthy nor Kennedy would be the i.

And information technology wasn't Johnson.

Two weeks after Kennedy joined the race, Johnson summoned Clifford to the White House and showed him the endmost lines of a speech he was to deliver on his efforts to negotiate an terminate to the state of war.

"Nothing in my career e'er surprised me and then much as what I read," Clifford said.

A shock from Johnson
On the sheet of newspaper Johnson handed Clifford were written the words with which Johnson would terminate his March 31 speech, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

Four days later, a sniper shot King to expiry in Memphis, sparking riots in the nation'southward capital and more than 100 other cities beyond the nation.

Then on June 5, moments after challenge victory in the California primary, Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles.

While Kennedy and McCarthy had been battling for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey also entered the race.

Humphrey left the primary battles to his two rivals, while he recruited party chieftains who has controlled some of the state delegations to the convention — enough delegations, every bit it turned out for Humphrey to win the nomination.

Third-party candidate George Wallace of Alabama posed a threat to both Nixon and Humphrey. His strategy was to deny either Nixon or Humphrey the Balloter College majority of 270, thus forcing the competition into the House of Representatives where Wallace could bargain for concessions.

The pugnacious populist
Wallace was a pugnacious populist who had expanded beyond his base of segregationists opposed to the civil rights move of the 1960s.

He railed against "federal judges playing God," "pseudo-intellectuals," and paper editors "who have looked down their noses long plenty at the boilerplate man on the street."

Referring to anti-war demonstrators who had lain downwardly in forepart of Johnson'due south presidential limousine, forcing it to finish, Wallace said when he became president he'd order the limo to keep going.

In the Republican competition, Nixon had outlasted challengers Michigan Gov. George Romney (begetter of Mitt) and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

At the Republican convention in Miami Beach, Nixon had to contend with tardily aspirant to the fray: California Gov. Ronald Reagan, conservative darling.

But South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, himself a presidential candidate in 1948, helped save Nixon.

If we want to win, Thurmond told his beau Southern delegates, we accept no pick but Nixon. "Nosotros must quit using our hearts and start using our heads. I love Reagan, merely Nixon's the i," Thurmond said.

In his speech communication to the convention, Nixon blamed Democrats for the Vietnam debacle.

"Never has so much military machine and economical and diplomatic power been used and so ineffectively," he declared. "The time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past."

He pledged that he'd seek "an honorable stop to the war in Vietnam."

Agnew: Democrat 'soft on communism'
As his running mate, Nixon chose the governor of Maryland, Spiro Agnew, who had reputation as a tough "law and gild" abet.

Agnew's off-the-gage comments presently fabricated him famous: he chosen Humphrey "soft on communism and soft on law and order" and for practiced measure called Humphrey'south stance on the Vietnam War "squishy soft."

Humphrey was trying to find a way to distance himself from Johnson, the war'due south architect.

In late September he delivered a speech in which he pledged to stop the bombing of North Vietnam "every bit an acceptable take a chance for peace" in hopes that information technology would spur serious war-ending negotiations.

Nixon brushed off Humphrey's call for a televised debate amid the iii candidates, accusing him of trying to "build up Mr. Wallace to defeat the Republicans where he himself cannot do so" — in the South.

He described Wallace as Humphrey's "secret weapon." The more prominence Humphrey gave Wallace, Nixon said, the more votes Wallace would siphon from the Republican ticket.

On Election Day, Nov. 5, the Southward, solidly Autonomous for most of the previous 80 years, was divide.

Nixon took the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida.

Wallace won three states that Thurmond had won in 1948 (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama), and added two more, Georgia and Arkansas.

Only he did not come shut to winning any state outside Dixie. He did get 12 per centum of the vote in Ohio and 15 per centum in Genesee Canton, Michigan, home to union members who worked at the General Motors plant in Flintstone.

Nixon wins from Ohio to the Pacific
Nixon ran the Balloter College tabular array from Ohio all the way to the Pacific Declension.

Humphrey dominated the Northeast and was able to agree his home state of Minnesota and Michigan, too as Texas (thanks to Johnson).

Autonomously from those three, he failed to win any states from the Appalachians to California.

Humphrey blamed his loss partly on McCarthy, who only endorsed him just a week earlier the election and only so with a singled-out lack of enthusiasm.

McCarthy had a fervent post-obit in California, Ohio, Illinois and New Jersey where, Humphrey wrote in his memoirs, "a united political party working in my behalf might take inverse the electoral issue. Those states could have been won…Particularly in California, had McCarthy campaigned early and hard for me and the Democratic Political party, he might have turned it."

Humphrey said he could not win over the young, anti-war voters who would have voted Democratic if Kennedy or McCarthy had been the nominee.

"I did not realize how deep the acrimony and hatred of the immature had become," he lamented.

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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26840327

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