General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It would be nice if the centrists in this party did some introspection, too. [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Nixon didn't beat Humphrey because people thought Humphrey was too liberal, and there was no one to Humphrey's right who'd have done better against Nixon in '68-the only ones who could have done better were to HHH's left-RFK, who was murdered, and McCarthy, whose delegates were literally beaten by the cops in Chicago.
McGovern was running against the Dirty Tricks squad...his positions on the issues had nothing to do with his loss, and the most electable candidate, Ed Muskie-who agreed with McGovern on 98% of the issues and was just as antiwar as McGovern-was destroyed early on by that SAME Dirty Tricks squad.
Scoop Jackson would have lost 49 states, too in '72-Humphey, had the party renominated him, would have taken almost no votes that McGovern didn't take.
Nor did it have anything to do with either Reagan term-Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 as a result of Iran and the right-wing economic policies Carter implemented-the ones that placed a greater emphasis on low inflation than full employment. Carter, good man though he still is, was doomed to lose that year from the moment the hostages were taken-the result would have been the same had Teddy Kennedy not run at all.
And in 1984, we nominated Mondale, who made a show of presenting himself to the fall electorate as more conservative than Carter-refusing to connect with the massive nuclear freeze and Central American solidarity movements, distancing his campaign from the grassroots anti-Reagan resistance-and who also made the indefensible decision to promise a tax increase NOT to restore cuts in social spending or to more vigorously enforce environmental protection and labor laws, but in the name of the Wall Street obsession with balancing the budget-even though doing that was never going to be to the benefit of anybody in the Democratic coalition.