Who won the 1968 Presidential race?
Edited to add the Presidential election...
From
The New America: Politics In The Sixties by Tom Brokaw
The 1968 Presidential election was, in spite of Gayan "Events" and ongoing civil rights unrest in the South, largely a pedestrian affair. The shocking discovery of former Vice President Nixon's remains earlier in the year helped solve a mystery left over from the Cough, while President Johnson, his health failing from stress and possible exposure to a non-lethal strain of the Cough virus, had decided early on not to run.
This left the nomination wide open for both parties. As in 1964, the leading candidates campaigned on a "Return to normalcy". As the governor of California, Ronald Reagan's tough law and order stance had given him national hero status in the eyes of many conservatives in the post-Cough era. On the other side, Edmund Muskie was regarded as a competent if unspectacular leader in the Senate. The wild card was George McGovern, who ran as an independent. In his own words, it was not because of the way things had been going in America since the Cough, but in spite of them. McGovern angered many Democrats by leaving the party, and many of them would never forgive him for it, as they proved when he was denied the Democratic nomination four years later.
In the end, the election was Reagan's to lose, and with his law and order campaign as well as a promise to withdraw Federal troops from the South, he was able to out-campaign Muskie and win the White House.