AH Challenge: McGovern Wins

How can we have George McGovern win the 1972 presidential election? What PODs are needed, both in McGovern's campaign, and in the US as a whole to make that happen?

What effects would a McGovern presidency have on the United States? I would say that it nixes Gerald Ford as President, and may have butterfly effects on both Carter and Reagan.
 
The only probable POD is for Watergate to blow up in, say, September or October.

Sure Watergate was known, and McGovern railed about it, but nobody really paid attention. Have someone make a mistake that means it leads to Nixon faster, or whatever.


Nixon's a crook on national TV, and McGovern wins by default. Likely the Watergate babies of 1974 come in '72 & '74 TTL, and McGovern has a half-decent congressional majority.


As to what happens, who knows. McGovern probably pulls out of Viet Nam, which means South Vietnam falls in '73 or '74; he may try and pass his guaranteed annual income, but it likely won't pass without Republican forced cuts in stuff like welfare and Medicare (remember that Nixon would have passed something similar if he had offered cuts in entitlements); national health insurance is a possibility as McGovern pushing for it is more palatable than Nixon pushing for it (Ted Kennedy wanted national healthcare, and so turned Nixon down); and so forth.

Overall, however, Nixon was pretty left-wing on domestic programs (because he only cared to break the Democrats, he didn't actually care about domestic issues) and so McGovern is unlikely to be much further left—at best, as I mentioned, a few programs that Nixon offered but didn't go forward get passed.


1976 rolls around and McGovern faces Reagan (nobody else in the Republican party was going to beat Reagan in '76, heck Ford only narrowly won and he was the President).

Odds are Reagan wins. McGovern only won in the ATL because Nixon imploded (presumably Nixon wins the South and a couple other states in '72), and Reagan will carry California, the South, the traditional Republican states in the Rocky Mountains and Midwest, and probably the industrial belt—which means McGovern loses.

However, Reagan has a Democratic congress (certainly the House, probably the Senate), the US is likely experiencing much of the same difficulties as they did in OTL '70s (though health insurance + NIT/GAI) is going to be a solid buffer for the poor and middle class, and so on.


Reagan, albeit with a somewhat different US, probably does most of the things we discuss in the various "Reagan wins in '76" threads scattered around—keeps Panama, if McGovern hasn't handled it already; deregulates; possibly a large tax reform that results in overall lower taxes (avoiding his OTL see-saw of tax raises and cuts over the first few years as ATL Reagan isn't a supply-sider and isn't seeking a 30% cut—so think '86 tax reform) or if not just moderate tax cuts; takes a harder line against the USSR; and so forth.
 
How can we have George McGovern win the 1972 presidential election? What PODs are needed, both in McGovern's campaign, and in the US as a whole to make that happen?

I'd say if Nixon had been caught sodomizing little boys in the Rose Garden, McGovern might have had a chance of winning. A very small chance.

Seriously, the most ironic thing about the fall of Nixon was that he was busted, basically, for cheating in an election he couldn't have lost if he'd tried.
 
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I'd say if Nixon had been caught sodomizing little boys in the Rose Garden, McGovern might have had a chance of winning. A very small chance.

Seriously, the most ironic thing about the fall of Nixon was that he was busted, basically, for cheating in an election he couldn't have lost if he'd tried.
which makes you wonder why the heck he did that.
 
which makes you wonder why the heck he did that.

Polls in 1970 and 1971 showed Muskie ahead of Nixon. Nixon panicked, and slaughtered Muskie (fake French-Canadian thing) and got lucky when a reporter thought (he later admitted he wasn't sure) that he saw Muskie cry.
 
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