w.i. Republican congress during waltergate?

I think one way this can be done is if Muskie is nominated in 1972. He would lose by a smaller margin, but Congress would not be able to separate themselves from the doomed Democratic ticket. As such, Nixon would have large coattails and turn Congress red.
 
Gerald Ford would be thrilled. But a Republican House does not automatically protect Nixon. Remember in the Senate Howard Baker was one of Nixon's fiercest critics during the scandal-and he was a Republican too.

What matters is not just a partisan split but who Chairs the key committees.

I've mentioned this before but Tip O'Neil insisted that Nixon would have served out his term if Emmanuel Celler had been reelected. So who the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee might matter more than partisan margins.

This is before Gingrich-I have a hard time seeing even a Republican Congress be so hyperpartisan that the House and Senate as a whole adopt a "Watergate does not matter" attitude.

With Ford as Speaker Nixon might be out sooner-since there will not be a period of time when punishing Nixon would risk overturning the 1972 election by placing a Democrat in the White House.
 
I think one way this can be done is if Muskie is nominated in 1972. He would lose by a smaller margin, but Congress would not be able to separate themselves from the doomed Democratic ticket. As such, Nixon would have large coattails and turn Congress red.

The notion that a smaller victory would produce more coattails than a larger one seems counterintuitive to me. But in any event I don't see any way the Republicans can get a majority in the Senate. In OTL the Democrats ended up controlling the Senate 56-42. The only Democrats to win by less than eight percent of the vote were Haskell of Colorado, Biden of Delaware, Huddleston of Kentucky, Hathaway of Maine, and Metcalf of Montana. Even in the very unlikely event that all of them lost, the Democrats would keep control of the Senate. And why in the world would Hathaway do worse with his own state's Muskie heading the ticket? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1972

Actually, I think with Muskie heading the ticket, the Democrats would do better in the Senate. Ed Edmondson might in in Oklahoma, and one of the authentic oddballs of American politics, Terry Carpenter (the man who nominated "Joe Smith" for vice-president at the 1956 Republican national convention) might win in Nebraska as a Democrat... http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-delegates-dissent-at-a-boring-convention https://www.c-span.org/video/?3990-1/joe-smith-incident
 
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