1 jan 1972 ano - Nixon wins second term

Descrição:

As his reelection campaign approached, President Nixon took advantage of rising discontent over “law and order” and busing. In doing so, he became the beneficiary of a growing backlash against liberalism that was realigning American politics. The last great electoral upheaval had come between 1932 and 1936, when many Republican voters abandoned their party to support FDR, and many Americans voting for the first time likewise sided with the Democrats — forging an electoral coalition that lasted nearly four decades. The years between 1968 and 1972 proved to be a similar watershed. This time, it was Democrats who changed their votes and Republicans who captured a new electoral generation.

Reforms in the Democrat Party’s nominating procedures had opened the door for George McGovern, a liberal South Dakota senator and favorite of the antiwar and women’s movements, to capture the presidential nomination. But McGovern quickly ran afoul of the party’s old guard. He failed to mollify key backers such as the AFL-CIO, which, for the first time in memory, refused to endorse the Democratic ticket. A weak campaigner, McGovern was no match for the hardboiled Nixon, whose supporters ridiculed the Democrat as the candidate of “Acid, amnesty, and abortion” — referring to McGovern’s alleged support for drug legalization (which was false), amnesty for draft evaders (true), and women’s reproductive rights (true). Taking advantage of incumbency, Nixon also claimed credit for a surging economy and proclaimed (prematurely) a cease-fire in Vietnam.

Appealing again to the “silent majority” of those who “care about a strong United States, about patriotism, about moral and spiritual values,” Nixon won in a landslide, receiving nearly 61 percent of the popular vote and carrying every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia (Map 27.4). The returns revealed the fracture of traditional Democratic voting blocs. McGovern received only 38 percent of the big-city Catholic vote and, remarkably, only 60 percent of self-identified Democrats nationwide voted for him. The election results demonstrated the country’s shift to the right. Yet observers legitimately asked whether 1972 proved the popularity of conservatism or only that the country had grown weary of liberalism and the changes it had wrought.



In one of the most lopsided presidential elections of the twentieth century, Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat George McGovern in a landslide in 1972. It was a reversal of the 1964 election, just eight years before, in which Republican Barry Goldwater had been defeated by a similar margin. Nixon hoped that his victory signaled what Kevin Phillips called “the emerging Republican majority,” but the president’s missteps and criminal actions in the Watergate scandal would soon bring an end to his tenure in office.

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