Muskie vs Nixon

Could Muskie have defeated Nixon if he was the Democratic nominee in 72 if he'd avoided the crying incident or had somehow turned it in his favor?

Anyone defeating Nixon with a 1972 POD under OTL circumstances is borderline ASB. Muskie fell to pieces with what by Nixonian (or Rovian/Kennedyesque standards, depending) standards was kindergarten stuff. He's almost the John Kerry of that cycle: looks presidential, has a long enough resume, a Northeastern liberal who offends no one. Gets crushed by Nixon with Nixon winning a landslide closer to OTL 1996 than OTL 1972, but still another huge Democratic loss. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Richard Nixon chose his Democratic opponent.

He'd likely do better then McGovern, but no, unless the economy really takes a bad turn or there's a staggering setback in Vietnam, Nixon still wins. CREEP will see to it.

I doubt Muskie can beat Nixon, but he'll be able to hold labor voters, which crossed over to Nixon (by a small margin of course) thanks to the nomination of McGovern. What you probably end up with is Muskie trying to have it both ways in holding together the New Dealers and the New Leftists by promising to end the conflict in Viet Nam, though economic issues will be a much larger part of the campaign.

In fact, a Muskie nomination probably makes the campaign at least about the issues, rather than vague cultural platitudes. Muskie can run on the economy, which still wasn't great in 1972, and will probably at least be able to hold on to the industrial north against Nixon.



President Richard Nixon (R-CA) / Vice President Spiro Agnew (R-MD): 52.3% (338 Electoral Votes)
Senator Ed Muskie (D-ME) / Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN): 46.2% (200 Elecotral Votes)

I prefer George Meany's line: "The Democratic Party has been taken over by people named Jack who look like Jills and smell like johns."

It's interesting to think what would have happened if Muskie, HHH, or Jackson had won the nomination. All three were pretty traditional New Deal Democrats (Jackson a little more of a hawk than the other two). Could they have held the NDC together, at least for a few more cylces? McGovern pretty much torpedoed the whole party.

If you aren't aware of it you may be interested in Drew's excellent "Fear, Loathing and Gumbo" TL in this very forum which posits the idea of a more moderate, Southern Democrat winning the Democratic nomination in 1972 instead of McGovern.

Yeah I've read parts of it. The only problem is that McKeithen wasn't really so moderate, and was actually pretty conservative and a standard old SoDem.

The NDC did not fall apart because McGovern was nominated, it fell apart because the political interests of WWCs and minorities started to be directly opposed to each other. That process began with the Watts riots in 1965 and escalated through to 1968. Many WWC RFK supporters went directly to Wallace in November instead of Nixon, which should have been a 5-alarm warning for the Democratic Party. They ignored it and didn't reassemble the NDC until 1992, when Clinton swapped out farmers for suburbanites.

RogueBeaver said:

The NDC did not fall apart because McGovern was nominated, it fell apart because the political interests of WWCs and minorities started to be directly opposed to each other. That process began with the Watts riots in 1965 and escalated through to 1968. Many WWC RFK supporters went directly to Wallace in November instead of Nixon, which should have been a 5-alarm warning for the Democratic Party. They ignored it and didn't reassemble the NDC until 1992, when Clinton swapped out farmers for suburbanites.

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Basically this. When the Democratic Party decided to completely ignore white ethnics, it lost its ability to govern as a party. If there had been a stronger attempt at a colorblind, rather than an intrinsically race based liberalism in the late sixties, this might have turned out differently. RFK could hold everyone together, and Humphrey also had a good shot at it.

Jackson of course would have been the penultimate Democratic candidate. He holds the New Dealers, labor, the blacks, the environmentalists, the hawks, and also grabs back the WWC. The New Leftists will probably sit out, but they were never a large enough constituency to get the Democrats majority status anyway, so a Jackson candidacy at some point (either '72, '76, or '80) would be a godsend for the Democrats.

The only problem the Democrats are going to have is coming up with a left-wing alternative to Monetarism as a cure for the bad seventies economy. Hubert Humphrey was proposing social democratic coordination and planning in the last years of his career, and the astounding power of labor in the seventies before it's flameout near the end of the decade might actually make something like that possible, if you get the right person in the White House.

Carter is not that person. He has no clear base in the Democratic Party and is by all accounts, a terrible manager of nearly everything he touches. You have to make sure he gets his ass kicked in the primary or that the primary deadlocks in '76 and the DNC nominates Humphrey as compromise to get the New Deal coalition to hang out for a bit longer. Or just have Jackson trounce Carter in the primary.

No one can defeat Nixon!.... except Nixon himself. I don't know if defeating him is ASB, not if the whole Watergate thing happened/was exposed earlier, during the election campaign.

I would love to know just where those numbers for that "map" came from. Without a source they just become conjecture by the author.

The truth about Nixon is that he was always on the edge of a few different scandals at any particular time. Any one of which could have brought the whole the whole house of cards down, which it ultimately did. When he was found to be involved after the Watergate break in, investigations kept finding more and more evidence of misconduct by the administration.

As for Muskie there have been persistent rumors that the crying incident was brought on by a cup of coffee the had been dosed with LSD. Is there any proof that such an event actually happened? No. Would I put it past some of the operatives in the employ of the Nixon administration to pull such a stunt? Also no.

So could have Muskie have won? If he had gotten the nomination, there was a good chance depending on events on the campaign, same as anyone else who has ever run for office.

Muskie was a softie who couldn't take the heat and his composure had already been slipping for a while. "If you get only 60% in NH, will you consider that a defeat?" Then there was false scheduling information courtesy of the ratfuckers, next the Canuck Letter and finally the cracks about Jane challenging the press corps to a round of drinks. None of this stuff is particularly hardball. To quote Angle, "man up."

As for the rest, we all agree that the map is ASB. Muskie had also been one of LBJ's strongest backers on Vietnam, which means he can be tagged with the flip-flop label.