"Richard Nixon is Dead"

Reagan was more hawkish than Nixon, so I think that Reagan would not have won all of Nixon's OTL votes. I also think that if you wanted to make a deal with Wallace you would offer him the Attorney General's job.
 
Humphrey struggled to make up any ground against the popular populist Reagan and as November 5th approached Reagan held an enormous lead. At the urging of his party Humphrey engaged in a desperate campaign to overturn Reagan for the final week. Humphrey claimed that Reagan was a "closet fascist" and called upon former-president Eisenhower to condemn the man or risk America becoming "everything you spent a half a decade and 10's of thousands of men fighting against. He called Reagan a traitor to the American dream, a corporate pawn, and a threat to everything that was American. While this tirade succeeded at motivating his base, it pushed away many independents and moderates who remained in the party. When the election day finally came it was clear Reagan would be victorious and indeed he was, topping Lydon Johnson's massive landslide 4 years earlier. Reagan won 63% of the vote and every state except Minnesota, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and DC leaving the electoral college at 510-28 in favor of Reagan. Reagan had a mandate to rule, that was for sure, the only question now was what he and his Vice-President James Rhodes would do with it.

Was Humphrey really given to rants and tirades? I thought he was referred to as the "Happy Warrior." Even if for some reason he was goaded into such a speech, I still think that much of the American public is a little bit smarter than to fall for the old "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" approach Reagan is using here and using "those damn Hippies" as scapegoats. Many may see truth in such a rant. In any case, didn't the more radical "Hippie" groups see Humphrey as pro-war, seeing as he was VP under Johnson? If so, it'd be easy for Humphrey to distance himself from them, and lean more towards the center.
 
Can I just state that Reagan in no way was a Populist. He was very much a Statist and Corporatist and believed that the poorer Americans brought it upon themselves and didnt deserve help.
 
Why is everyone necromancing a banned member's thread?

All the '68 major-party candidates except McCarthy and Reagan were Vietnamizers, Humphrey was the "Happy Warrior", etc.

Reagan a statist and corporatist? We're talking about Ronald Reagan, not Ted Heath here.
 
Sorry, I didn't realize this was an old thread. But, Abe Lincoln isn't marked as banned... looks like he has been posting as recently as late February.
 
Even if this is an old thread with some questions, the TL is interesting and poignant. Some points of seeming merit:

Miami was and remains a pretty tight city for demonstrations/unrest. Yes, there was a riot there (1981?), etc. but as a convention city, more than one presidential convention has been there and no incidents to note. My grandfather was told there in 1929 that if you did not have a job, they would automatically throw you in jail in Fort Lauderdale county (?) to the north, and matters have not changed much.

Also, both Nixon and LBJ had unpredictable habits in politicing, with lots of security. Bobby was lax on that and often got into adversorial positions (so to a lesser degree did Nixon in his younger years, like in 1954 Burma, but he modified his approach). But if it did happen, the Republican ticket would have been very possibly up to Reagan.

Reagan was viewed as a lightweight in foreign policy compared to Nixon by insiders (eg Bohemian Grove), but Rocky was thought worse.

FBI did very little infiltration to the SDS (Weathermen split off in 1969?), but that soon changed.

Anyway, an interesting topic.
 
Reagan a statist and corporatist? We're talking about Ronald Reagan, not Ted Heath here.

Yes, the man who worked his ass off to help corporations in any way possible, while he distrusted the poor and thought that because they were poor they were lazy.
 
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