Trump Was Hoping for Another 1972 but Democrats Just Made a Strategic Counter Play
Make no mistake about it — 1968 was even more violent, more chaotic, and more divided than 2016. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon hoped to dress it up as a remake of 1968. But back then, the problems were real. In 2016, not so much.
Still, the basics of the Richard Nixon playbook worked in Donald Trump’s favor in 2016, dividing Democrats and suppressing the vote in just enough places to hand him a slim margin of victory. Nixon’s win was hardly a mandate — he beat Hubert Humphrey by a scant half of one percent and with a 43.4% plurality of the popular vote — but the victory wasn’t entirely orchestrated by his dirty tricksters (although some of it was). Rather, Nixon was an opportunist who got lucky and slipped in at a time when the Democratic Party had been regionally fractured and was working to align with the civil rights movement.
After Nixon’s election (which always bothered him because of how he very nearly lost), he wanted to assert himself with a decisive victory in 1972. He knew he could not achieve that goal if he had any major competition, so he enlisted a group of bad actors to help sabotage any Democrat who was polling too close for comfort. During their research, they discovered that George McGovern would be so easy to beat that Nixon would win in a landslide. And win in a landslide he did.
48 years later, Trump is using that strategy once again — with the help of Roger Stone and Steven Bannon, no doubt — to “ratfuck” the presidential race and win a second term. This time, he wants more than a slim margin of victory in the swing states and he doesn’t want another scenario where his opponent wins the popular vote. No, in order to prop up his power and his ego, he needs a far larger decisive victory that will say, as it did with Nixon in 1972, that Americans unequivocally want Trump. And that will give him the satisfaction that he’s craved from everyone his entire life: if he can’t earn their love and admiration, he will cheat to bring them to their knees.
“When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow” — a quote hung on G. Gordon Liddy’s wall from All the President’s Men.
How does Trump intend to ensure a landslide victory? Well, as John Kasich once said, if Bernie Sanders is the nominee, then Trump will win in every state. While I don’t think he can win with such a large landslide as Nixon did, I do believe that once a self-proclaimed socialist gets that close to the White House, millions of otherwise apathetic voters will feel motivated to turn out to stop him. That will be a bigger incentive for most voters than getting rid of a guy who lays claim to a good economy, has choked off immigration by 11%, and is coasting comfortably on the historically low unemployment rate that Obama handed him. Right or wrong, these are the simplistic ways we have been taught to measure the success or failure of our presidents. There’s no way are Americans going to toss aside THAT for someone as risky and frightening to them as Sanders.
But on Super Tuesday Democratic voters didn’t fall in line. They didn’t do what Trump wanted them to do (at least so far, they haven’t). For now, we have subverted the pattern. In 1972, had Hubert Humphrey or Edmund Muskie gotten the nomination (Nixon feared Muskie more than he feared Humphrey), that situation would have been closer to the place we find ourselves right now. Now, rather than choosing the George McGovern candidate, Democrats appear to be saying, “ We know this isn’t a ‘big structural change’ election, but rather, singularly and more urgently, a referendum on the incumbent.” Will this shift in mentality work this time?
We know that Trump’s side will continue to push the narrative that Bernie should run against Trump. Maybe their ploy will work. Maybe they will get their perfect dream candidate to hand Trump a landslide victory. Or maybe Democrats will unite behind a guy they know can beat Trump and step gracefully into the job on Day One.
Taking out a one-term president is always a tricky proposition as it rarely happens. The chances seem slim until you factor in not only the fracture on the Left, but on the Right as well. If you see Trump as the existential threat that many believe he is, then you will understand what it will take to remove him. Unfortunately, that is going to require a good deal of adjusting our dreams and sucking it up. It will mean accepting support from Mike Bloomberg and James Comey and welcoming all of the Never Trumpers. It will require being okay with a bit more fracking in Pennsylvania, for the time being. It will require not being militant about Medicare for All (unless Republicans entirely evaporate from Congress — that’s a fight that will be fought for over the next 20 years, guaranteed). It will require being anti-anti-establishment. That is what we mean when we talk about sucking it up.
In 1968, liberal Democrats were still in a euphoric fog from the promise of JFK/RFK’s influence on American culture and Lyndon Johnson’s breathtaking progress with civil rights and the Great Society. Similarly, that’s how many Democrats felt coming out of the clouds of the Obama presidency in 2016, especially for the youngest voters who have never known anything else. Both of these milestone eras were about cultural change. Civil rights, women’s rights, and bold progressive leaders defined the late ’60s and early ’70s. Gay rights, affordable healthcare, and amplifying the voices of minority groups defined the Obama era. The one key difference is an issue that tore Democrats apart in 1968: the Vietnam war. Remember that the reason Nixon and Humphrey nearly tied with 43% of the popular vote was because George Wallace had tapped into the ominous 14% of American who were unapologetic racists. In the end, it boiled down to stabilization and status quo vs. radical action and civil unrest. Americans plagued by five years of assassinations and civil turmoil wanted to tap the brakes.
In 2016, the parallels have everything to do with Bernie Sanders, very much a Rip Van Winkle of the 1960s who took a nap for 50 years but has now awoken to reanimate a revolutionary spirit for the mostly disgruntled progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He spent 20 years mostly unemployed and another 20 years in Congress not doing much of anything, but he sure knows how to make great angry speeches. His anti-establishment stance sat there mostly inactive until two things happened that woke up a vocal faction of the electorate hungry for revolution and change: the Iraq war and the Wall Street bailouts. Obama, whose primary goal was to avert a global economic depression, was in no position to counter the fury the public felt towards Wall Street. Meanwhile on the Right, billionaires like the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer saw a ripe opportunity, and flipped the script to capitalize on that revolutionary spirit by turning the wrath away from themselves and against Obama with their artificial “grassroots” Tea Party movement.
On the Left, at least it can be said that the populism was real, not manufactured as it was on the Right. But people like Bannon and Stone saw a way to milk the turmoil to bring down the Obama coalition’s heir apparent, Hillary Clinton. The only play the Democrats had in 2016 to hold onto a third Obama term was to do what Ronald Reagan did in 1988: make the case that Reagan’s policies had been good for the country, so let’s have four more years of it. Sanders did the opposite, by disparaging everything Democrats had fought for years to achieve, and the resulting contentious confusion gave the Mercer and Putin troll battalions exactly the kind of fracture they needed to dissolve Obama’s incredible legacy.
America’s pool of liberal voters is finite, so obviously the better Bernie did, the worse Hillary would do. Trump’s campaign, buttressed by surreptitious forces we were only beginning to discover, had a smartly devised narrow path for him to eke out a victory. They knew they could not really grow Trump’s support (since America’s pool of racists is also finite). but they figured they could dampen the support for Hillary by using Bernie Sanders. And a powerful wedge he became — in effect, Trump’s most powerful tool, even if he was an unwitting one.
Bernie and his most militant supporters in 2016 became what the anti-war movement was to the Democrats in 1968: televised agents of chaos. He’s still here in 2020 and Trump strategists hope to use him again — only this time around, they intend to do what the Democrats did in 1972 with McGovern. He was the anti-war guy, and Bernie is the anti-establishment guy.
Democratic voters could have buckled under to this narrative and said, yeah, let’s go with Bernie since Hillary failed. But they haven’t done that so far. Instead, they have done what Democrats chose not do in 1968. They are aligning with the candidate they know has a better chance of defeating Trump.
The end game remains a cliffhanger. No one-term President since 1900 has been removed without a faltering economy. Unless there’s a complete collapse of government, this country is never going to go for socialism — maybe someday they will, but right now they won’t.
If it’s up to me, I’d place my chips behind the guy that Trump got impeached for trying to smear.
