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| Source:ABC News- anchor Howard K. Smith in 1972. |
“This is a rare color clip of the 8-28-72 Edition, of the ABC Evening News. This is about the struggles of 1972 Democratic Nominee Thomas Eagleton, who was the VP nominee until he was dropped for mental health issues.
This is the first of a series of Videos, ending with Election Night 1972 from ABC News, which I will upload sometime.”
From EFAN
George McGovern did a lot to bring in new voters to the Democratic Party by reaching to African, Latin, Asian, and Jewish Americans. As well as women and suburban voters, after the civil rights movement of the 1960s with a large number of Southern Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans heading to the GOP because of civil rights. And you could credit Senator McGovern with even saving the Democratic Party because without these new voters, all of these new people would’ve ended up Republicans, or not voting at all.
Without George McGovern we would’ve seen Republican Congress’s, not just a Republican Senate, but the GOP would’ve won back the House and Senate well before 1994. Perhaps even by 1980 with the Reagan Revolution, because the Democratic Party would’ve been left with a large hole to fill. With all of those Southern voters heading to the GOP, without other voters heading to the Democratic Party. So by bringing in all of these new voters to the Democratic Party, Senator McGovern deserves credit for saving the Democratic Party. From future losses in Congress and the White House after 1972.Democrats added to their majorities in Congress in 1974. And they won back the White House while holding both the House and Senate in 1976.
The Democratic Party paid such a heavy price for it in 1972, yes President Nixon was pretty popular, but they were a very divided party between establishment Progressives who wanted a united party to face the Republicans in the fall and the anti-war New-Left Socialists that wanted to take over the party and return it to where it was in the 1960s and build on the New Deal and Great Society. And George McGovern also deserves credit for running the most disorganize convention in the TV era.
Even if Senator Tom Eagleton didn’t have the pass mental health controversy going on, George McGovern not just loses, but loses going away. The Eagleton Affair (as it was called) was just another reminder of how disorganized the Democratic Party was in the early 1970s. And it’s until 1975 or so after the Watergate affair that the Democratic Party finally recovered at the presidential level, from what went on in the late 1960s.
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