Going into the 1988 election season, President Dole realized that he was in trouble. His approval ratings and job performance numbers were anemic and the president considered many possible solutions to reverse the trend, including replacing Vice President Heinz on the ticket, but settled instead on capitalizing on the ongoing peace negotiations the State Department was mediating between Israel and Egypt. Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Shamir were moved from Athens, where negotiations had been taken place previously, to Camp David, where Dole and Secretary Kissinger (who had secretly informed the president that he would retire regardless of if Dole won re-election) succeeded in getting the two leaders to finally agree to a peace treaty and normalization of relations. The Camp David Accords and subsequent treaty were a shot in the arm for the Dole re-election campaign and the subsequent withdrawal of Israel from the Sinai Peninsula during the next couple of years and its effects on international trade (with the chance of an international incident in the Suez Canal now greatly decreased) would largely become the most positive part of Dole's legacy.
On the Democratic side, the loss of three straight presidential elections had left the party increasingly desperate for a candidate who could appeal to the voting bloc that had shifted to the Republicans that party leaders felt would enable another victory: southern whites. As such, several southern politicians were courted as potential regional candidates who, in the mind of many party leaders who believed that many northern Democratic voters would not vote for a non-incumbent southern candidate following the Johnson presidency, run as the "southern candidate" and drop out to endorse the eventual nominee, who most believed would be Walter Mondale. What these leaders didn't expect was Kentucky Senator Walter D. Huddleston throwing his hat into the ring. Huddleston had previously been considered as a vice presidential candidate in 1984 and by 1988 had become the strongest southern candidate, but the national media did not initially take his campaign seriously, focusing instead on Mondale and other northern challengers such as Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Maine Governor George Mitchell and New York Governor Mario Cuomo.
Huddleston's strong performance in Iowa shocked the political world and the withdrawal of Mitchell after the Maine Governor's second-place showing in the neighboring New Hampshire primary quickly upset the predictions of the remaining northern candidates. The Super Tuesday 1988 was chaotic. Senator Biden was rushed to the hospital the Sunday night before after suffering an aneurysm, leaving Biden supporters to throw their votes between Cuomo, Mondale and Huddleston. Huddleston won enough support to cement his front-runner status and by the time Cuomo agreed to withdraw to allow Mondale to be the anti-Huddleston candidate, the Kentuckian had secured enough support from the party superdelegates to make the rest of the primaries a formality. Despite calls to pick one of his rivals for the ticket, Huddleston chose Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard, hoping to prevent a repeat of the Glenn campaign's loss of the state to Dole four years earlier.
The dark horse victory of a southern moderate threw the Dole campaign for a loop. Huddleston, being a southerner, made serious inroads into states the Democrats had not seriously been able to contest since 1964 and with the Huddleston campaign co-opting primary rivals in conscious avoidance of a 1984-style split (Mondale had quickly been promised the Secretary of State position after the final primary in June should the Minnesota senator agree to campaign for Huddleston). With the opposing party united, Dole made his success in Camp David a main campaign theme and made the promise to move any nuclear missiles away from populated areas as a result of the post-Kahuta nuclear panic. The latter promise, which initially boosted the president into the lead, led to a fierce reaction from retired national security officials who pointed out that this would make it near-impossible to move nuclear weapons or construct them anywhere but isolated missile silos in the Great Plains and Midwest.
View attachment 249973
Dole could not quite overcome his low popularity and job performance ratings and voter fatigue with the Republican Party, which had controlled the presidency for 12 years. Huddleston became the first Democrat since Humphrey in 1968 to win a southern state (and Humphrey had won Texas largely because of Lyndon Johnson's control over the state) and the first president to have defeated an incumbent president who was previously elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover sixty-six years earlier.