1968 United States presidential election

1968 United States presidential election

← 1964 November 5, 1968 1972 →
538 members of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win
Opinion polls
Turnout	62.5%[1] 0.3 pp
Nominee Richard Nixon Hubert Humphrey George Wallace Party Republican Democratic[c] American Independent[d] Alliance Parties Alabama Democratic Party Independent Home state New York[a] Minnesota Alabama Running mate Spiro Agnew Edmund Muskie Curtis LeMay[e] Electoral vote 301[b] 191 46[b] States carried 32 13 + DC 5 Popular vote 31,783,783 31,271,839 9,901,118 Percentage 43.4% 42.7% 13.5%
Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Nixon/Agnew, blue denotes those won by Humphrey/Muskie, and orange denotes those won by Wallace/LeMay, including a North Carolina faithless elector. Numbers indicate electoral votes cast by each state and the District of Columbia.
President before election Lyndon B. Johnson Democratic Elected President Richard Nixon Republican

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 both 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. It is often considered a major realigning election, as it permanently disrupted the Democratic New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics since 1932.

Incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson had been the early frontrunner for the Democratic Party's 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 in June 1968, part of a streak of high-profile assassinations in the 1960s. Humphrey edged out anti-Vietnam war candidate McCarthy to win the Democratic nomination, sparking numerous anti-war protests. Nixon, who lost in 1960 to John F. Kennedy, entered the Republican primaries as the front-runner, defeating liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, conservative California governor Ronald Reagan, and other candidates to win his party's nomination.

The election year was tumultuous and chaotic. It was marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in early April, and the subsequent 54 days of riots across the nation; 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 widely publicized police crackdowns on protesters, reporters, and bystanders.

Humphrey's promise to continue the Johnson administration's war on poverty and support for the civil rights movement led to an erosion of Democratic support in the South. This prompted a run by Wallace on the ticket of the newly-formed American Independent Party, which campaigned in favor of racial segregation on the basis of "states' rights." Wallace attracted socially conservative voters throughout the South (including Southern Democrats as well as former Barry Goldwater supporters who preferred Wallace over Nixon), and drew further support from white working-class voters in the Industrial North and Midwest who were attracted to his economic populism and anti-establishment rhetoric.

Nixon, promising to restore law and order to the nation's cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War, aimed at attracting a "silent majority" of moderate voters who were alienated by both Humphrey's liberal agenda and Wallace's ultraconservative viewpoints; Nixon also pursued a "southern strategy" and employed coded language in the Upper South, where the electorate was less extreme on the segregation issue.

Humphrey trailed Nixon by wide margins in polls taken during most of the campaign from late August to early October. In the final month of the campaign, Humphrey managed to narrow Nixon's lead 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 became 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.^[4]

This 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.^[5]

Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).