McGoverning: Appendix to Chapter 3, or, How to Butterfly an Election Like a Shrimp...
The first of two appendices to the chapter above: this one covers the gritty allohistorical details of the presidential election. You'll get a scorecard on other major races in the next appendix.
So how did they do it? How did this TL come to its particular end of the wild ride through a very different 1972 presidential election? What are the demographic breakdowns? When do we get some sweet, sweet Electoral College porn? The answer to that last question is, right now you lucky people:
This totals out as:
Sen. George S. McGovern (D-SD)/Sen. Philip A. Hart (D-MI), 271 EVs, 43.36%
Pres. Richard M. Nixon (R-CA)/Vice Pres. Spiro T. Agnew (R-MD), 219 EVs, 42.71%
Gov. George C. Wallace (AIP-AL)/Rep. John G. Schmitz (AIP-CA), 48 EVs, 13.88%
For starters, in the end the AIP ticket outperformed the party's 1968 results, notably in their popular-vote total. Numbers were up at least slightly for the AIP nationwide and the number of states in which they made the critical difference was frankly huge, given later second-preference polling of declared Wallace voters in different parts of the country. Local quirks late in the race denied Wallace Arkansas' electoral votes, chiefly former governor Winthrop Rockefeller deciding to go in for the Nixon ticket in an anti-Wallace effort and the one state in the country where an uptick in McGovern voting actually pulled down Wallace, rather than Wallace enabling McGovern pluralities. Wallace did in the end mobilize a conservative anti-Nixon vote, to the ends that he sought, it just wasn't quite enough in the end when matched up with the very late McGovern surge. Otherwise, the AIP got as close as they could while falling short of their goal in the end.
What about those McGovern numbers? Well, the national numbers reflect my methodology in general. First there's a portion of the shift (between OTL's final McGovern numbers and these numbers) of a little less than 0.5% that's a combination of improved turnout by McGovern partisans who don't feel discouraged here plus some low-information voters who decide that at least they haven't heard anything morally bad about McGovern. That gets the distance between OTL and this down to about 5%. Of that 5%, slightly less than half is voters McGovern keeps because there's no Eagleton disaster and he runs a more disciplined campaign in the fall that makes those voters feel it's worth sticking with him. Those are the numbers -- about 2-3% of the final vote total -- that electoral demographers and most reputable pollsters figure McGovern lost IOTL to the knock-on consequences of the Eagleton affair. So now we're inside of 3% in the gap. That gets closed by a combination of increased turnout among what we could call motivated voters (not "I'll vote for McGovern if I don't think it'll suck" but "I want to get rid of Nixon but need to believe my vote counts"), particularly under-25s and minority voters. And the under-25s who do bother to vote end up tending towards the ones who back McGovern (from the very start there was always a strong conservative element in the Baby Boom generation, they were just often politically lazy until Saint Ronnie turned up and made hippie-punching fun.) That accounts for some of the difference and it makes a critical difference in some states, for example in California and also, to some surprise, in Missouri. There are also more farmers and union workers who stick with the ticket in the end, but many of those can be reckoned in the lost-to-Eagleton column. The last vital difference, probably the entirety of the small margin between McGovern and Nixon above of just under 500,000 voters are a combination of self-declared independents and very, very liberal Republicans (still registered Republican but by '72 they vote Democratic about as often as they do for the GOP), more women among them than men, who decide that while they have reservations about McGovern they also have a civic duty to vote and he's better than these other two morally tainted candidates, Nixon and Wallace. This is the kind of voting that nets McGovern some very important states: to move with the time zones, Connecticut first, then Pennsylvania, then Iowa, then California and to a lesser degree (because McGovern is already strong there) Oregon.
At state-by-state level, then, with a few local variations based on what I set out as the local conditions in the race (like Arkansas), that governs the results. Take a slightly improved 1968 AIP percentage, take this McGovern total typically modified by a hair over 5%, and see what happens. Now, there are four key exceptions to that. In two cases it's only a slight difference, and that's in Connecticut and Missouri. In CT it's a combination of more union loyalty to the Democrats and Liberals-For-McGovern GOP turncoats. In Missouri it's more farmers who decide to go with the most objectively pro-small farmer candidate of either major party since 1945, plus increased youth and minority turnout in the urban areas, and holding the line on Catholics thanks to Phil Hart's campaigning and getting buy-in from the state's still-Democratic establishment in the end (the "we need to get Nixon out and McGovern will owe us one" argument.) Pennsylvania reflects this on a larger scale, in part because there are more Liberals-For-McGovern Republican types, in part because McGovern actually gets advised to wade in and align with the Miners For Democracy movement, most popular in PA because that's where the late Jake Yablonsky was from, and this gets more blue-collar types on his side who are far enough out of the South to calculate that a Wallace vote is ultimately wasted in their state. The big difference of anywhere in the country, the place where I've gotten closest to true handwavium rather than a different set of practical dynamics, is Maine. McGovern could certainly overperform in Maine in a TL like this, above his average national improvement. But that would still likely leave him short. In this case, Muskie and the state party pull out all the stops to encourage (untypical in Maine) straight-ticket votes for McGovern and Hathaway at the top of the ballot and then on down. Even then it's hairy. McGovern takes ME-1 with a small but clear majority. In the back country of ME-2 he just loses, and with it an electoral vote, but this is also the area where Wallace is strongest in the state. So when you tally up the Maine totals McGovern ends up winning by a plurality, which gives him three out of the four electoral votes and enough for the victory.
So despite the popular-vote margin it's really desperately close, because that margin's in places like New York and California and Illinois, where even one percent of the vote is a lot of people and places where his margin's any bigger helps, because a lot of the states where Nixon would otherwise crush McGovern have substantial Wallace votes that bite into Nixon's numbers. Really it's just over 9,000 votes in Missouri and a little over 3,000 in Maine that make the difference for an Electoral College victory. So in the end really you could shift just a hair over 20,000 votes in three states and come up with a hung Electoral College that looked like this:
McGovern/Hart 256 EVs
Nixon/Agnew 228 EVs
Wallace/Schmitz 54 EVs
Or, indeed, McGovern could win MO and take ME-1 by only a plurality and end up on 269 EVs, where all it takes is a faithless Elector to put him over -- or a deal with Wallace for one of the two or three Wallace states where Electors were not legally bound by their votes in 1972 (Louisiana comes to mind, Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo indeed....) The latter could potentially have Eagleton-ed McGovern, damaged the view that he was a different, more principled kind of politician. But in the longer term some of it would depend on the substance of the deal. So the degree to which this avoids a damned mess is wafer-thin.
How much difference, for that matter, does Wallace make in the end? A huge one. Based on second-preference numbers for Wallace voters and more sense among undecideds that there's only McGovern to go to if you want to vote against Nixon, you get something like this:
Nixon/Agnew 423
McGovern/Hart 115
A herculean effort delivers Phil Hart's home state by a plurality, and elsewhere Iowa and Illinois are really quite close but not close enough. With even more doom and gloom about Nixon you could probably snag both of them, which takes the McGovern total for the Electoral College to 149, a respectable effort with a national vote total maybe around 44% but even then the whole conservative-coalition phenomenon makes the difference. All for a GOP ticket whose Vice President will be lucky to make it to the inauguration without resigning and a President with ... some serious explaining to do. Really because of OH NOES TEH HIPPEHS and McGovern's positions on national security issues. What would that mean, ITTL, for the political future of the Dems? McGovern himself would probably give some serious consideration to a "buyer's remorse" run in 1976 and, if not, he would likely back the same kind of effort by Ed Muskie who in this 'verse has Loeb v. Segretti as well as Nixon's own mess to encourage people that Muskie Wuz Robbed. At the level of the Democratic establishment, there would be a lot of pressure for something like a Scoop Jackson/Reubin Askew ticket: the New Dealer hawk who was against busing at the top and an integrationist liberal Southerner who's into government reform but also anti-abortion on religious grounds (so in the comfort zone of "Catholic ethnics") to try and take the old Democratic coalition for one last ride because people flee to the familiar under stress. On the Republican side when Agnew goes there's still a very good chance that Ford ends up as the 25th-ed VP, and if not him Nixon either gambles on Reagan as an insurance policy against impeachment (and a chance to make this look even more like a partisan witch hunt if Democrats vote against him) or picks someone like Chuck Percy on the same general grounds as Ford, though Ford has more credibility with old-line (in other words pre-New Right) Republican conservatives. Really in most 'verses an Agnew-less Nixon finds Gerry Ford in the frame more often than not. I suspect, in-universe here where people remember the shock of McGovern's mythic, insurgent run for the presidency and the crazy election night that actually brought him into office, these are the AH discussions people would have later. And their content -- the propositions they make -- will have repercussions here as people mull over what alternatives to the fact of a McGovern Administration might look like.
So how did they do it? How did this TL come to its particular end of the wild ride through a very different 1972 presidential election? What are the demographic breakdowns? When do we get some sweet, sweet Electoral College porn? The answer to that last question is, right now you lucky people:
This totals out as:
Sen. George S. McGovern (D-SD)/Sen. Philip A. Hart (D-MI), 271 EVs, 43.36%
Pres. Richard M. Nixon (R-CA)/Vice Pres. Spiro T. Agnew (R-MD), 219 EVs, 42.71%
Gov. George C. Wallace (AIP-AL)/Rep. John G. Schmitz (AIP-CA), 48 EVs, 13.88%
For starters, in the end the AIP ticket outperformed the party's 1968 results, notably in their popular-vote total. Numbers were up at least slightly for the AIP nationwide and the number of states in which they made the critical difference was frankly huge, given later second-preference polling of declared Wallace voters in different parts of the country. Local quirks late in the race denied Wallace Arkansas' electoral votes, chiefly former governor Winthrop Rockefeller deciding to go in for the Nixon ticket in an anti-Wallace effort and the one state in the country where an uptick in McGovern voting actually pulled down Wallace, rather than Wallace enabling McGovern pluralities. Wallace did in the end mobilize a conservative anti-Nixon vote, to the ends that he sought, it just wasn't quite enough in the end when matched up with the very late McGovern surge. Otherwise, the AIP got as close as they could while falling short of their goal in the end.
What about those McGovern numbers? Well, the national numbers reflect my methodology in general. First there's a portion of the shift (between OTL's final McGovern numbers and these numbers) of a little less than 0.5% that's a combination of improved turnout by McGovern partisans who don't feel discouraged here plus some low-information voters who decide that at least they haven't heard anything morally bad about McGovern. That gets the distance between OTL and this down to about 5%. Of that 5%, slightly less than half is voters McGovern keeps because there's no Eagleton disaster and he runs a more disciplined campaign in the fall that makes those voters feel it's worth sticking with him. Those are the numbers -- about 2-3% of the final vote total -- that electoral demographers and most reputable pollsters figure McGovern lost IOTL to the knock-on consequences of the Eagleton affair. So now we're inside of 3% in the gap. That gets closed by a combination of increased turnout among what we could call motivated voters (not "I'll vote for McGovern if I don't think it'll suck" but "I want to get rid of Nixon but need to believe my vote counts"), particularly under-25s and minority voters. And the under-25s who do bother to vote end up tending towards the ones who back McGovern (from the very start there was always a strong conservative element in the Baby Boom generation, they were just often politically lazy until Saint Ronnie turned up and made hippie-punching fun.) That accounts for some of the difference and it makes a critical difference in some states, for example in California and also, to some surprise, in Missouri. There are also more farmers and union workers who stick with the ticket in the end, but many of those can be reckoned in the lost-to-Eagleton column. The last vital difference, probably the entirety of the small margin between McGovern and Nixon above of just under 500,000 voters are a combination of self-declared independents and very, very liberal Republicans (still registered Republican but by '72 they vote Democratic about as often as they do for the GOP), more women among them than men, who decide that while they have reservations about McGovern they also have a civic duty to vote and he's better than these other two morally tainted candidates, Nixon and Wallace. This is the kind of voting that nets McGovern some very important states: to move with the time zones, Connecticut first, then Pennsylvania, then Iowa, then California and to a lesser degree (because McGovern is already strong there) Oregon.
At state-by-state level, then, with a few local variations based on what I set out as the local conditions in the race (like Arkansas), that governs the results. Take a slightly improved 1968 AIP percentage, take this McGovern total typically modified by a hair over 5%, and see what happens. Now, there are four key exceptions to that. In two cases it's only a slight difference, and that's in Connecticut and Missouri. In CT it's a combination of more union loyalty to the Democrats and Liberals-For-McGovern GOP turncoats. In Missouri it's more farmers who decide to go with the most objectively pro-small farmer candidate of either major party since 1945, plus increased youth and minority turnout in the urban areas, and holding the line on Catholics thanks to Phil Hart's campaigning and getting buy-in from the state's still-Democratic establishment in the end (the "we need to get Nixon out and McGovern will owe us one" argument.) Pennsylvania reflects this on a larger scale, in part because there are more Liberals-For-McGovern Republican types, in part because McGovern actually gets advised to wade in and align with the Miners For Democracy movement, most popular in PA because that's where the late Jake Yablonsky was from, and this gets more blue-collar types on his side who are far enough out of the South to calculate that a Wallace vote is ultimately wasted in their state. The big difference of anywhere in the country, the place where I've gotten closest to true handwavium rather than a different set of practical dynamics, is Maine. McGovern could certainly overperform in Maine in a TL like this, above his average national improvement. But that would still likely leave him short. In this case, Muskie and the state party pull out all the stops to encourage (untypical in Maine) straight-ticket votes for McGovern and Hathaway at the top of the ballot and then on down. Even then it's hairy. McGovern takes ME-1 with a small but clear majority. In the back country of ME-2 he just loses, and with it an electoral vote, but this is also the area where Wallace is strongest in the state. So when you tally up the Maine totals McGovern ends up winning by a plurality, which gives him three out of the four electoral votes and enough for the victory.
So despite the popular-vote margin it's really desperately close, because that margin's in places like New York and California and Illinois, where even one percent of the vote is a lot of people and places where his margin's any bigger helps, because a lot of the states where Nixon would otherwise crush McGovern have substantial Wallace votes that bite into Nixon's numbers. Really it's just over 9,000 votes in Missouri and a little over 3,000 in Maine that make the difference for an Electoral College victory. So in the end really you could shift just a hair over 20,000 votes in three states and come up with a hung Electoral College that looked like this:
McGovern/Hart 256 EVs
Nixon/Agnew 228 EVs
Wallace/Schmitz 54 EVs
Or, indeed, McGovern could win MO and take ME-1 by only a plurality and end up on 269 EVs, where all it takes is a faithless Elector to put him over -- or a deal with Wallace for one of the two or three Wallace states where Electors were not legally bound by their votes in 1972 (Louisiana comes to mind, Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo indeed....) The latter could potentially have Eagleton-ed McGovern, damaged the view that he was a different, more principled kind of politician. But in the longer term some of it would depend on the substance of the deal. So the degree to which this avoids a damned mess is wafer-thin.
How much difference, for that matter, does Wallace make in the end? A huge one. Based on second-preference numbers for Wallace voters and more sense among undecideds that there's only McGovern to go to if you want to vote against Nixon, you get something like this:
Nixon/Agnew 423
McGovern/Hart 115
A herculean effort delivers Phil Hart's home state by a plurality, and elsewhere Iowa and Illinois are really quite close but not close enough. With even more doom and gloom about Nixon you could probably snag both of them, which takes the McGovern total for the Electoral College to 149, a respectable effort with a national vote total maybe around 44% but even then the whole conservative-coalition phenomenon makes the difference. All for a GOP ticket whose Vice President will be lucky to make it to the inauguration without resigning and a President with ... some serious explaining to do. Really because of OH NOES TEH HIPPEHS and McGovern's positions on national security issues. What would that mean, ITTL, for the political future of the Dems? McGovern himself would probably give some serious consideration to a "buyer's remorse" run in 1976 and, if not, he would likely back the same kind of effort by Ed Muskie who in this 'verse has Loeb v. Segretti as well as Nixon's own mess to encourage people that Muskie Wuz Robbed. At the level of the Democratic establishment, there would be a lot of pressure for something like a Scoop Jackson/Reubin Askew ticket: the New Dealer hawk who was against busing at the top and an integrationist liberal Southerner who's into government reform but also anti-abortion on religious grounds (so in the comfort zone of "Catholic ethnics") to try and take the old Democratic coalition for one last ride because people flee to the familiar under stress. On the Republican side when Agnew goes there's still a very good chance that Ford ends up as the 25th-ed VP, and if not him Nixon either gambles on Reagan as an insurance policy against impeachment (and a chance to make this look even more like a partisan witch hunt if Democrats vote against him) or picks someone like Chuck Percy on the same general grounds as Ford, though Ford has more credibility with old-line (in other words pre-New Right) Republican conservatives. Really in most 'verses an Agnew-less Nixon finds Gerry Ford in the frame more often than not. I suspect, in-universe here where people remember the shock of McGovern's mythic, insurgent run for the presidency and the crazy election night that actually brought him into office, these are the AH discussions people would have later. And their content -- the propositions they make -- will have repercussions here as people mull over what alternatives to the fact of a McGovern Administration might look like.
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