Idea: Humphrey vs. Nixon Round 2?

You can make it even more interesting, have it a total round two. h Have Wallace avoid getting shot. Id say Humphrey 41 percent Nixon 51 percent Wallace 7 percent.
 
You would need a POD at Chicago where HHH doesn't allow his delegates to vote for the motion creating what became McGovern-Fraser. It was done as a sop to McCarthyites, had anyone known what would eventually happen... insta-veto. Even during the process no one realized what was happening until it was too late. That said how does HHH create an effective contrast on the war since for most of '68 their positions weren't terribly dissimilar?

Humphrey would have to make a lot of concessions to the left wing of the party in 1972 if the primaries weren't open, because they were so frustrated with how it turned out in 1968. At that point, primary reform was necessary to stop the McCarthy/McGovern supporters from peeling off as a third party in the next election.

So if the Democratic machine had just been able to put up Humphrey as a candidate in 1972 with no ground campaigning, they would have outraged a small but significant part of their base and lost a few percentage points to a "Peace Party" or something. This could cost them the election, if it was close.

In this scenario, Humphrey would need someone with impressive anti-war credentials as the VP candidate - not sure who, though. McCarthy and McGovern probably wouldn't agree as they'd been too antagonized by the party establishment. Mike Gravel, maybe? He was a political newcomer but had gained some notoriety for reading the entire transcript of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.
 
I supsect he would be seen as having stolent the nominaiton Humphrey would lose, probably not as badly as McGovern in OTL.

Of course that would mean that folk further to the left would have an opening in 1976 with watergate and all
 
So if the Democratic machine had just been able to put up Humphrey as a candidate in 1972 with no ground campaigning, they would have outraged a small but significant part of their base and lost a few percentage points to a "Peace Party" or something. This could cost them the election, if it was close.

In this scenario, Humphrey would need someone with impressive anti-war credentials as the VP candidate - not sure who, though. McCarthy and McGovern probably wouldn't agree as they'd been too antagonized by the party establishment. Mike Gravel, maybe? He was a political newcomer but had gained some notoriety for reading the entire transcript of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.
Agreed. But it couldn't be a real New Lefterif they waned to win and were assuming they did.
 
Agreed. But it couldn't be a real New Lefterif they waned to win and were assuming they did.

(Bit of a nitpick here - New Left usually refers to actual Marcuse-influenced socialists like the SDS, New Politics is the term for the left wing of the Democrats around McCarthy and McGovern.)

But I agree. Again, Gravel might be a good bet as (as far as I know) he didn't have much of a public profile and the only thing people knew about him was that he was anti-war - he didn't have a track record like McGovern of personally calling out Senators as murderers and referring to Ho Chi Minh as "the Vietnamese George Washington", which was easily twisted in OTL to portray McGovern as a communist.

Edit: Just realized that I'm proposing that a veteran party member take on a little-known Alaskan maverick political newcomer to shore up his credentials with the fringe of his party, which didn't work out so well in OTL :p
 
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As said before, then Majority Whip O'Neill could have stepped up, but he probably wouldn't have left Congress for anything but an Ambassadorship to Ireland.
 
Blocking a McGovern nomination on the first-ballot is obviously a pre-condition of a brokered convention at which Humphrey could emerge as the consensus nominee.

To stop McGovern on the first-ballot would require (1) the McGovern challenge to the Mayor Daley-controlled Illinois delegation fails, and either (2)(a) the anti-McGovern challenge to the California winner-take-all rule actually succeeds (McGovern won the California primary, beating Humphrey 44%-39%) so that Humphrey gets a proportional share of the delegates, or (2)(b) ITTL Humphrey won the California winner-take-all primary and beats back a McGovern challenge to the winner-take-all rule.

Nixon vs. Humphrey 2 in 1972 would obviously be a much closer contest than the Nixon landslide over McGovern in OTL.
 
Blocking a McGovern nomination on the first-ballot is obviously a pre-condition of a brokered convention at which Humphrey could emerge as the consensus nominee.

To stop McGovern on the first-ballot would require (1) the McGovern challenge to the Mayor Daley-controlled Illinois delegation fails, and either (2)(a) the anti-McGovern challenge to the California winner-take-all rule actually succeeds (McGovern won the California primary, beating Humphrey 44%-39%) so that Humphrey gets a proportional share of the delegates, or (2)(b) ITTL Humphrey won the California winner-take-all primary and beats back a McGovern challenge to the winner-take-all rule.

Nixon vs. Humphrey 2 in 1972 would obviously be a much closer contest than the Nixon landslide over McGovern in OTL.
The big question is who does he pick for the No.2 slot?
 
Humphrey picked a liberal New England Senator (Ed Muskie) in 1968 and lost. My guess is that, if he won the nomination in 1972, Humphrey would take a serious look at a New South governor such as Jimmy Carter of Georgia or Askew of Florida or perhaps Senator Lloyd Bentson of Texas.
 
Humphrey picked a liberal New England Senator (Ed Muskie) in 1968 and lost. My guess is that, if he won the nomination in 1972, Humphrey would take a serious look at a New South governor such as Jimmy Carter of Georgia or Askew of Florida or perhaps Senator Lloyd Bentson of Texas.

What? He needed someone who was against the war early, for starters. If he can portray a far more effective anti-war message he'll do a ton better. In 1968 once LBJ let him oppose the war, his numbers did rise remarkably. It was just too late.
 
Humphrey picked a liberal New England Senator (Ed Muskie) in 1968 and lost. My guess is that, if he won the nomination in 1972, Humphrey would take a serious look at a New South governor such as Jimmy Carter of Georgia or Askew of Florida or perhaps Senator Lloyd Bentson of Texas.

I'm not sure you could make the argument that Humphrey lost because of Muskie, or that Muskie was in any respect the crucial factor behind Humphrey's defeat in 1968, certainly Muskie's status as the front runner for the nomination before Nixon's dirty tricks took him out of contention suggests that the party did not blame him for that defeat and did not consider his nomination to have been a mistake.

That said, there might be a chance that Humphrey nominates a Southerner, on the other hand, something tells me that Humphrey is going to want a kind of consensus choice. That might be a southerner, it might not be, but I think Humphrey is going to want someone everyone can support. I think Humphrey is going to be cautious on the issue of the Vice Presidency. Now I don't know who the possible "consensus candidate" would be, so I can't say who would be a likely nominee here
 
I'm not sure you could make the argument that Humphrey lost because of Muskie, or that Muskie was in any respect the crucial factor behind Humphrey's defeat in 1968, certainly Muskie's status as the front runner for the nomination before Nixon's dirty tricks took him out of contention suggests that the party did not blame him for that defeat and did not consider his nomination to have been a mistake.

That said, there might be a chance that Humphrey nominates a Southerner, on the other hand, something tells me that Humphrey is going to want a kind of consensus choice. That might be a southerner, it might not be, but I think Humphrey is going to want someone everyone can support. I think Humphrey is going to be cautious on the issue of the Vice Presidency. Now I don't know who the possible "consensus candidate" would be, so I can't say who would be a likely nominee here

I'm not arguing that Humphrey lost in 1968 because of Muskie, only that Muskie, as a New England liberal, didn't help the ticket very much except in his home state of Maine. With George Wallace obviously not running as an independent candidate in 1972--especially after being crippled by Bremer in an assassination attempt--and Humphrey likely being nominated as a consensus candidate over McGovern ITTL, Humphrey is more likely to pick a southerner to win some EVs in that region. This is especially true if delegates from the South helped him win the nomination over McGovern.
 
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