1968 United States presidential election

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 1968. The Republican ticket of former Vice President Richard Nixon and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew defeated the Democratic ticket of incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Edmund Muskie and the American Independent Party ticket of former Alabama governor George Wallace and general Curtis LeMay. The election cycle was tumultuous and chaotic, and is often characterized as one of the most violent in American history. It was marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in early April and the subsequent 54 days of riots across the US; the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in early June; and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War across university campuses as well as at the Democratic National Convention, which saw police crackdowns on protesters, reporters, and bystanders. Incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson was the early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, but withdrew from the race after only narrowly winning the New Hampshire primary. Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy emerged as the three major candidates in the Democratic primaries until Kennedy was assassinated. Humphrey, who supported the Vietnam War, defeated the anti-war McCarthy to win the Democratic nomination, sparking protests. Humphrey's promise to continue the Johnson administration's war on poverty and support for the civil rights movement eroded his support in the South, prompting a third-party run by Wallace that campaigned for racial segregation on the basis of "states' rights." Wallace attracted socially conservative voters throughout the South (including Southern Democrats and former Barry Goldwater supporters), as well as white working-class voters in the North and Midwest through his economic populism and anti-establishment rhetoric. Nixon, who narrowly lost in 1960 to John F. Kennedy, entered the Republican primaries as the frontrunner, defeating liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, conservative California governor Ronald Reagan, and other candidates to win the nomination. Nixon took advantage of Democratic infighting and mounted a campaign that promised to restore "law and order" to US cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. He aimed at attracting a "silent majority" who were alienated by Humphrey's liberal agenda and Wallace's ultraconservatism; he also pursued a Southern strategy and employed coded language in the Upper South, where the electorate was less extreme on segregation. Humphrey trailed Nixon by wide margins in polls for most of the campaign, but managed to narrow Nixon's lead in October, after Wallace's candidacy collapsed and Johnson suspended bombing in the Vietnam War to appease the anti-war movement; the election was considered a tossup by election day. Nixon managed to secure a close victory in the popular vote, with just over 500,000 votes (0.7%) separating him and Humphrey. In the Electoral College, Nixon's victory was larger; he carried the tipping point state of Ohio by over 90,000 votes (2.3%), and his overall margin of victory in the Electoral College was 110 votes. Wallace remains the most recent third-party candidate (as of 2024) to carry any state in a presidential election. This was the first presidential election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which began restoring voting rights to Black Americans in the South, who had been disenfranchised for decades under Jim Crow. The 1968 election is often considered a major realigning election, as it permanently disrupted the Democratic New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics since 1932. It was the last presidential election until 2024 in which the incumbent president was eligible to run again but was not the eventual nominee of their party. Nixon also became the first non-incumbent vice president to be elected president, something that would not happen again until 2020.