Cruz/McGovern

I'm very late at getting to this, but the great Steve M. took on my weekend column on Ted Cruz, and I did want to respond to part of it.

Not the part where Steve argues that I'm wrong about the possibility of a Cruz move to the center in the event he was to win the nomination. I'll stand by what I said, but there's no way to know, and he may certainly be correct. We're in the realm of speculation in choosing between "Cruz is what he is, and would only be more so after a successful nomination campaign" compared with "Cruz would be more able to move to the center than Romney/McCain types." And I'll readily concede that reputation (which is what matters here) may be sufficiently sticky that moving to the center wouldn't help even if it happens, and he might be stuck with a reputation for extremism regardless of what he does in the general election.

No, the part I want to respond to is about 1972. I said that a large part of Nixon's landslide was the fundamentals; Steve argues (with links, which I'm not redoing here):

OK, stop right there. Nixon beat McGovern because Nixon was "a popular president during good times"? As Rick Perlstein notes in Nixonland, at the beginning of 1972 Nixon had a 49% approval rating, and the Harris poll showed him beating Ed Muskie by only 1 in a three-way race with George Wallace, who was expected to run as a third-party candidate. Unemployent and inflation had increased significantly in Nixon's first term, as had the crime rate; Perlstein notes that the movies in the theaters -- Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, The French Connection -- depicted rampant crime. Oh, and the war was still going on, and the country was still racially polarized. No, we weren't happy campers in 1972 reveling in peace and prosperity. We were just sold on the notion that Nixon was the uprightest of citizens holding the line against dirty hippies like George McGovern. That's largely why Nixon rose in the polls throughout 1972 and crushed McGovern.

I strongly disagree. It's correct about January 1972; in fact, as I've said, Watergate makes sense in the context of what looked like it might be a close election at that point. But not about November 1972. It was a very good economic year (Nixon was no Carter-like fool; he, like LBJ before him, did everything he could to goose the economy during an election year). The trips to China and the USSR early in the year were major events, and the war was winding down all year, too. That, and not the contrast with McGovern, was surely why Nixon's approval rose in the first half of 1972.

Beyond that, it's not clear that reputation for ideological extremism was McGovern's main problem that year. The Democrats really were fundamentally split; Nixon's sabotage made it worse, but the divisions were real and painful. There's nothing remotely like that on the Republican side right now; there's no significant group or faction that might walk or sit out the campaign if Cruz wins the nomination, so that nominating whoever the GOP '16 version of Muskie or Humphrey would prevent it. And then there's the campaign's troubles beyond ideology, including the chaotic convention and the disaster with the VP slot.

Again: I definitely think that reputation for ideological extremism cost McGovern and Goldwater (and Reagan). But the 1972 and 1964 elections weren't primarily about the out-party candidates,

The More Things Change

Not Watergate related: Bob Haldeman's diary, July 11, 1972 (for those who haven't been following along, Haldeman is Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff):

Billy Graham called to give me the names of all his Christian youth types. He's very enthusiastic and thinks we have a very good group to work with us. He also feels we have a good chance on the blacks by splitting them and getting the religious blacks who are scared of the criminal elements [sic] and so on to come over to our side. He thinks we're in good shape with the Jews.

It's not quite the same as today; there's nothing about abortion and gays scaring all the blacks to vote for Nixon (at least not from what Haldeman says about what Graham said). But it's awful close!

And as long as I raised it I might as well let you know it worked about as well as usual, too. Nixon wound up with, according to one study, about a third of the Jewish vote -- more than he got in 1968, but just about normal for 1972-1984. As for African Americans...Gallup has "nonwhite" as a category, which is quite a bit more Republican than just the black vote (compare later years when both are available), and McGovern won that by a whopping 87-13 spread; ignoring survey error, Nixon only did one point better than in 1968, and two points worse than the combined Nixon plus Wallace total. 

After the Starter's Gun

I mentioned earlier that the early reform years, roughly 1972-1980, are just different from the fully-evolved process that settled in during the 1980s and continues to the present. One good indicator of that is that in 1972 and 1976, candidates actually believed they could jump in after New Hampshire -- a strategy that was perfectly reasonable in the previous era (1912 through 1968), but made no sense at all under the reformed process.

In 1972, both Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace started late and skipped New Hampshire (and the little-noticed Iowa caucuses, which helped George McGovern get his campaign started); both, I believe, had entered the race in late 1971, but believed that they could begin organizing for primaries after New Hampshire. It's a bit hard to get info on it, but I believe that Scoop Jackson and John Lindsay also skipped New Hampshire (and Iowa) in order to focus on the upcoming Florida primary. Of course, the upshot of all this was that all future candidates would compete in New Hampshire, and most would also try to win Iowa.

But that still wasn't entirely clear in 1976. In that year, Senator Frank Church and Governor Jerry Brown both jumped in very late, with both competing in selected May and June primaries and in several cases winning them, in what from a distance appears to have been the most useless and futile campaigns ever. In some ways, Brown's 1976 campaign isn't entirely unlike the Chris Christie thing: Governor Moonbeam had just been elected in 1974 (for the first time), was probably a good match for activists Democrats that year on attitude if not  necessarily on issues, and was a strong contrast to the lackluster frontrunner in a year in which Democrats believed they were highly likely to win. On the other hand, Brown certainly never has had anyone question his ambition, especially for the White House, and whatever Christie is up to he's certainly not going to jump in, say, after Florida.

Again, the only point here is that I really recommend ignoring the first two, and perhaps the first three, cycles under the reformed nomination process, at least in terms of drawing any lessons for how things work now.