Democrats held Representative-majorities 26 states after the 1968 election.
Guess it was a different election than ours in more than one way.
Yes but in this story Wallace presumably carried some states just as he did in the actual history. Those states were all in the South. All of those states had Democratic majorities in the House. Some of them could well have voted for Wallace leaving Johnson one or more short.
And Nixon was a citizen of New York in 1968.
In 1968, I wasn’t quite old enough to vote, but I think Johnson would have stood a better than even chance. Young people were against him-but we didn’t get to vote. There was a lot of conflict over Vietnam-but there was still lots of support. Anti-communism was still very very powerful.
His biggest weakness was civil rights. When he signed the 1964 civil rights bill he commented that the Democrats had lost the south for a generation (or more).
But he would have been a powerful political boss in charge of a powerful Democratic machine. If he had run and lost, it would have been over civil rights not the war.
I don’t think there was any way RFK was going to win the nomination, particularly against Johnson.
Nixon Never Said He Had a ‘Secret Plan’ for Vietnam
My guess is that 1968 was a time-for-a-change GOP year due the Democrats having held the White House since 1961.
I said Nixon claimed to have a secret plan not a ‘secret plan’.
The difference is that Nixon probably never used those exact words. And the writer of the article you linked to seems to think that was the important point. The writer is wrong.
During the campaign, Nixon repeatedly said he had plans for ending the war but he wouldn’t give any details about what those plans were. And if you have plans but won’t tell people what they are, they’re secret plans.
After he was elected and became President, Nixon didn’t reveal what his supposed plan was and the war dragged on for several more years. That makes it seem likely that Nixon never had a plan for ending the war when he was running for President in 1968 but thought that saying he did would help get him elected.
Did any side not actually want to end the war? The war would have ended had the US won, which is what the pro-war faction thought was possible. Like, Ronald Reagan wanted the war to end quickly, but he certainly wasn’t a peacenik.
The people wanted the endless body count stories on the national news to stop. Ending the war would have stopped that.
But ending the war was at the time synonymous with winning the war. Everybody on the inside knew by 1967 that the war was unwinnable, and knew that Ho Chi Minh, having called for unconditional withdrawal, would never stop the war. (Although, ironically, he died within a year of the election.) That put Johnson into the untenable position he found himself. Nixon, however, had the advantage of not having to defend Johnson’s past policies. He could simply lie and announce that he would end the war, with the unspoken assumption that he would do so on favorable terms, i.e. any terms in which it did not appear that the U.S. had lost the war.
Johnson did not have that option. Or the option to stop listening to protesters call him a baby killer outside his windows every day. His wanting to get out was understandable. I also don’t think he considered the notion that Nixon would win. Thinking that Richard Nixon could actually win the presidency at that time was something like thinking in March of 2016 that Donald Trump could win the presidency. No sane person could both believe in the United States as a decent country and believe that such a person could be its president.
Johnson was wrong about that. But who at the time was right?