Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president.
1968 was a tumultuous year that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The unpopular, failing Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson collapsed amid mass protests against the Vietnam War.
Nevertheless, Humphrey nearly defeated Republican Party candidate Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent).
The warring Democrats might have defeated the unpopular Nixon if not for several unforeseen events.
Their convention in Chicago turned into a terrifying carnival of televised riots and radical protests. Hippies and leftists were seen fighting police in the streets on prime-time news.
Former Alabama governor George Wallace ran as a states-rights independent and won 13.5 percent of the vote. Wallace destroyed the customary Democratic influence in the elderly “solid South” by winning five Southern states. He also pulled away enough customary Democratic supporters to give Nixon astonishing Republican victories in a half-dozen other states in the region.
Nixon managed to pick up votes in several northern, blue-collar states that often voted Democratic, such as Wisconsin and Ohio – also with the aid of Wallace, who appealed to disaffected working-class Democrats.
What was the lesson from 1968?
Democrats could reframe their message to better appeal to working-class voters.
They should rebuild the elderly coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s era that elected Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, largely by appealing to wage issues and avoiding radical programs.
Yet despite gaining 12 seats in the House of Representatives in the 1970 midterm elections, and rather than attributing the 1968 defeat to Wallace’s maverick populism and voter backlash against radicalism, the Democrats veered off course and turned sharply left in 1972.
Lowering the voting age to 18 in 1971 misled Democrats into believing that most newborn voters were leftists and that record numbers of voters would vote for leftist candidates.
That’s why Democrats in 1972 foolishly nominated a staunch leftist from South Dakota, Senator George McGovern.
Although President Nixon was not a popular political figure, he was busy uniting voters, moving across the political map. Astute, versatile, and pragmatic, Nixon spoke strenuous to the right, but in reality he moved to the center. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He vastly expanded the welfare state and pushed for universal health care.
Nixon also introduced wage and price controls and visited communist China. Nixon ridiculed conservative icons such as California Governor Ronald Reagan and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. as right-wing troublemakers and elitist ideologues.
In other words, Nixon was as controversial — and politically unpredictable and misunderstood — as Donald Trump.
The November 1972 election was one of the largest Republican victories in American history. Nixon was re-elected with more than 60 percent of the vote, winning 49 of the 50 states.
Democrats held on to Congress only because sober-minded Democratic senators and House members running for reelection never followed McGovern’s far-left trajectory.
Democrats did not occupy the White House until 1980, when Jimmy Carter, a centrist populist from the South, ran a winning campaign in the style of Humphrey.
Will 2020 end for Democrats like 1972?
So far the similarities are uncanny.
Hillary Clinton lost the election, but won the popular vote over Trump. If she had campaigned more in the so-called “blue wall” states of the Rust Belt and the Midwest, and not foolishly called a quarter of the country “irredeemable” and “deplorable,” Clinton might have won the Electoral College as well.
As in 1968, the lesson learned from the 2016 election loss was that Democrats needed to become more responsive to the needs of the working class — and not pander to sensitive cultural and social issues.
But it looks like Democrats may be headed for another McGovern-style crushing defeat.
Democrats now blame Clinton for being too centrist, not for running a terrible campaign. The newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, is a polarizing figure on the far left.
The Democratic Party’s most prominent supporters include increasingly smug Hollywood actors, wealthy Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites, and disgruntled media figures, as well as careerist identity groups and various protest movements—the fossilized echo chamber of 1972.
The Democratic politically correct messaging derides opponents as pathetic racists, sexists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, and nativists. This shrill invective further alienates middle America. Being simply anti-Trump is no more effective a Democratic agenda than being anti-Nixon was in 1972.
Of course, anything can happen in politics.
Trump may not run for re-election or he may become as unpopular as Lyndon Johnson.
War or economic crisis can overshadow politics.
Democrats could find a charismatic candidate like Obama who could win on personal popularity.
Still, if Democrats move as far left in 2020 as they did in 1972, they will likely suffer an equally dire defeat.
