1972 United States presidential election information
47th quadrennial U.S. presidential election
1972 United States presidential election
← 1968
November 7, 1972
1976 →
538 members of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout
56.2%[1] 6.3 pp
Nominee
Richard Nixon
George McGovern
Party
Republican
Democratic
Home state
California
South Dakota
Running mate
Spiro Agnew
Sargent Shriver (replacing Thomas Eagleton)
Electoral vote
520[a]
17
States carried
49
1 + DC
Popular vote
47,168,710
29,173,222
Percentage
60.7%
37.5%
Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Nixon/Agnew and Blue denotes those won by McGovern/Shriver. Gold is the electoral vote for Hospers/Nathan by a Virginia faithless elector. Numbers indicate electoral votes cast by each state and the District of Columbia.
President before election
Richard Nixon
Republican
Elected President
Richard Nixon
Republican
Watergate scandal
The Watergate complex in 2006
Events
List
Presidency of Richard Nixon
Timeline
Nixon White House tapes
Operation Sandwedge
Operation Gemstone
1972 presidential election
"Saturday Night Massacre"
Impeachment process against Richard Nixon
United States v. Nixon
Resignation speech
Inauguration of Gerald Ford
People
Watergate burglars
Bernard Barker
Virgilio Gonzalez
Eugenio Martínez
James W. McCord Jr.
Frank Sturgis
Groups
Master list of Nixon's political opponents
Nixon's Enemies List
Watergate Babies
Watergate Seven
White House Plumbers
CRP
Committee for the Re-Election of the President
Fred LaRue
Jeb Stuart Magruder
Robert Mardian
John N. Mitchell
Kenneth Parkinson
Hugh W. Sloan Jr.
Maurice Stans
White House
Richard Nixon
Alexander Butterfield
Charles Colson
John Dean
John Ehrlichman
Gerald Ford
H. R. Haldeman
E. Howard Hunt
Egil Krogh
G. Gordon Liddy
Gordon C. Strachan
Rose Mary Woods
Judiciary
Archibald Cox
Leon Jaworski
John Sirica
Journalists
Carl Bernstein
Bob Woodward
Barry Sussman
Harry M. Rosenfeld
Howard Simons
Ben Bradlee
Katharine Graham
Lesley Stahl
The Washington Post
Intelligence community
Mark Felt ("Deep Throat")
L. Patrick Gray
Richard Helms
James R. Schlesinger
Congress
Howard Baker
Sam Ervin
Peter W. Rodino
U.S. Senate Watergate Committee
Impeachment process
Related
Frank Wills (security guard)
James F. Neal (prosecutor)
All the President's Men (book, film)
The Final Days (book, film)
Blind Ambition (miniseries)
Dick (1999 film)
Mark Felt: The Man who Brought Down the White House (2017 film)
Watergate (2019 board game)
Slow Burn (2020 series)
Gaslit (2022 series)
White House Plumbers (2023 miniseries)
v
t
e
The 1972 United States presidential election was the 47th quadrennial presidential election held on Tuesday, November 7, 1972. Incumbent Republican president Richard Nixon defeated Democratic U.S. senator George McGovern in a landslide victory. With 60.7% of the popular vote, Richard Nixon won the largest share of the popular vote for the Republican Party in any presidential elections.
Nixon swept aside challenges from two Republican representatives in the Republican primaries to win renomination. McGovern, who had played a significant role in changing the Democratic nomination system after the 1968 presidential election, mobilized the anti-Vietnam War movement and other liberal supporters to win his party's nomination. Among the candidates he defeated were early front-runner Edmund Muskie, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey, governor George Wallace, and representative Shirley Chisholm.
Nixon emphasized the strong economy and his success in foreign affairs, while McGovern ran on a platform calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam War and the institution of a guaranteed minimum income. Nixon maintained a large lead in polling. Separately, Nixon's reelection committee broke into the Watergate complex to wiretap the Democratic National Committee's headquarters as part of the Watergate scandal. McGovern's general election campaign was damaged early on by revelations from his running mate Thomas Eagleton, as well as the perception that McGovern's platform was radical. Eagleton had undergone electroconvulsive therapy as a treatment for depression, and he was replaced by Sargent Shriver after only nineteen days on the ticket.
Nixon won the election in a landslide victory, taking 60.7% of the popular vote and carrying 49 states and becoming the first Republican to sweep the South, whereas McGovern took just 37.5% of the popular vote. Meanwhile, this marked the last time the Republican nominee carried Minnesota in a presidential election. This also made Nixon the first two-term vice president to be elected president twice. The 1972 election was the first since the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, further expanding the electorate.
Both Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew would resign from office within two years of the election. The latter resigned due to a bribery scandal in October 1973, and the former resigned in the face of likely impeachment and conviction as a result of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Republican House Minority Leader Gerald Ford replaced Agnew as vice president in December 1973, and thus, replaced Nixon as president in August 1974. Ford remains the only person in American history to become president without winning an election for president or vice president.
Despite this election delivering Nixon's greatest electoral triumph, Nixon later wrote in his memoirs that "it was one of the most frustrating and in many ways the least satisfying of all".[2]
^"National General Election VEP Turnout Rates, 1789-Present". United States Election Project. CQ Press. Archived from the original on July 25, 2014. Retrieved February 21, 2023.
^Emig, David (November 7, 2009). "My Morris Moment »". Archived from the original on April 18, 2023. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
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Global Information
6.3 pp
