This election season, there are many parallels to the election year of 1968 on display, and none of it bodes well for Democrats’ chances in November.
It didn’t work out for Democrats back then, certainly, with Republican Richard Nixon handily defeating Hubert Humphrey, and Republicans picking up a net five seats in both the Senate and the House, along with a net gain of five governorships.
Here are a few of these observed similarities.
Radical leftists are again eating their own
The first parallel, which many have already noted, is that the Democratic National Convention (DNC) will be again held in Chicago in August of this year, as it was in a politically contentious 1968. Recent events signify that the city may again be witness to mass protests outside the DNC, just as when “tens of thousands of protestors swarmed the streets to rally against the Vietnam War and the political status quo” in 1968.
Pacifying those radicals without alienating the political center will be difficult. But this is the Faustian bargain that Democrats chose, then and now.
By 1968, there had been an explosion of outrage over American military defense of South Vietnam against the aggression of the communist North Vietnam. Escalation in this Cold War conflict had occurred over many presidencies, and as such, the communist-sympathizing activists on college campuses viewed this as a systemic result of the American political status quo.
Sen. Bernie Sanders recently argued that the Israel-Hamas conflict might become “Biden’s Vietnam.” Politically, he may be right. America is divided today on the conflict in the Middle East, and in a way that presents something of a catch-22 for Biden’s administration as it did for Democrats in 1968.
In December of 1967, 34% of polled Americans wanted to “get out” of Vietnam. 33% wanted a negotiated peace, while 26% wanted a total victory. This signifies a slight edge to public support for “full withdrawal” over “total victory” among the public, but that middle ground covers an awful lot of potential dispositions about that war.
For example, also observed in December of 1967 was that, while most Americans (55%) opposed using atomic ground weapons, 51% of Americans did support an invasion of North Vietnam with American troops. In other words, many who desired a “negotiated peace” also desired an absolute and full prosecution of the war in order to achieve an outcome of eventual peace, and not a withdrawal which surrendered South Vietnam to the communists. As CNN’s Harry Enten pointed out in late April, Biden is facing a similar scenario. He observes that Biden’s approval on the Israel-Hamas war is at just 28%, which is even lower than Biden’s abysmal approval ratings on the economy and inflation. Enten continues, saying that “President Biden truly is between a rock and a hard place,” pointing to a graphic which shows that 33% of Americans say that Biden’s support for Israel is “too much,” while 37% say that it’s “about right,” and another 21% say that it’s “too little.”
“If, all of a sudden,” Enten says, “President Biden were to become less friendly toward Israel, he could, in fact, alienate” the 58% of Americans that advocate support of Israel, and he expresses doubts that Biden’s alienating this clear majority would “work out for him, overall.”
It was a tougher spot for LBJ then with American troops on the ground overseas, but it’s certainly still a very tough spot for Biden and Democrats now.
Americans are again feeling substantial inflation shock
In the early 1960s, inflation wasn’t really an issue. Americans had become accustomed to inflation rates between 1- and 2-percent, and when LBJ was inaugurated in 1965, annual inflation was just under 1%.
That all changed when LBJ announced his “Great Society” initiative. He and Congress engaged in massive social spending that sent inflation rates soaring, nearing 5-percent by the time of the 1968 election.
Similarly, Americans in 2020 had become accustomed to low inflation rates, enjoying a rate just over 2% for 20 years prior to the Biden presidency. Then, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress spent trillions on unnecessary COVID handouts and the magic beans of “green” stimulus. The latter was packaged and sold to the rubes as an “Inflation Reduction Act,” though it amounted to little more than a handout to uber-wealthy tech and green energy magnates, stoking inflation even more.
Given Biden’s polling on inflation and the economy, it’s safe to say that Americans don’t like inflation any more today than they did in 1968. His blatant lying about inflation certainly isn’t helping his cause. Recently, this serial liar and president* suggested that inflation was at 9% when he entered office, and that his policies have actually effected a reduction to inflation. In fact, the annual inflation rate in January of 2021 was 1.4%, and it didn’t reach 9% until June of 2022.
And in case rampant inflation devaluing your dollars isn’t enough, Biden is promising to raise your taxes as a bonus. He has signaled that he will allow the 2017 tax cuts expire without any alternative, which will amount to nothing short of a tax hike the vast majority of Americans.
Democrats are again poised for a mad fracas to replace the incumbent
In early 1968, Johnson’s unpopularity had signaled that he was unelectable in November, and he faced strong opposition in the Party. It was “a year of continuous nightmare,” as LBJ would later recall.
His leading opponent early on was anti-war Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, who performed well in the New Hampshire primary, snagging 20 of the 24 state delegates.
Smelling blood in the water, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) announced his candidacy on the Democratic ticket a few days later. LBJ also saw the writing on the wall. On March 31st, LBJ declared that he would not be seeking reelection.
His vice president and logical successor, Hubert Humphrey, took nearly a month before scrambling to campaign and gather delegates, as RFK racked up primary wins in Indiana, D.C., and Nevada. Tragically, after handily winning California on June 4, RFK was assassinated as “the votes were still being counted.”
It wasn’t just the war protests outside that made the 1968 Democratic National Convention an unruly fiasco. Inside, the event was a political squabble that had all the appearances of being rigged by the Democrat party. RFK was on a trajectory to win, but he was murdered. Hubert Humphrey did not enter a single primary, yet he had managed to get the delegates needed for Party nomination over McCarthy, who had been primarying early and understandably didn’t endorse Humphrey immediately after the convention.
Democrats were in disarray. And this, I believe, will be a parallel in 2024. It simply hasn’t yet fully become manifest.
Biden was unelectable when the primaries began. We all knew it. I wrote about it then, and my forecast has not changed. His addled mind is withering away in front of us, with his demeanor routinely shifting from incoherence and confusion to anger and frustration.
He’s clearly senile, as only a fringe of the electorate denies. More than four-in-five Americans believe he’s too old for the presidency. There will be those who say that Democrats are pot-committed, and that they now have to put that decrepit old man who shuffles past reporters while mumbling incoherently on the Democrat ticket in November.
1968 proves those assertions wrong. Democrats aren’t any more interested in allowing voters to weigh in on the Democrat presidential candidate today than they were in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey was anointed without ever having entered a primary, or they were in 2016 or 2020, when Bernie Sanders was politically assassinated to anoint Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden by way of some very obvious internal party shenanigans.
But none of this will assuage the angry, pro-Hamas mob that will assemble outside the Chicago DNC arena in August. And it definitely won’t make voters forget that inflation is crushing them.
Third-party spoiler?
Another parallel, perhaps, is that the1968 election had a third-party candidate in the mix. Former Alabama and segregationist governor George Wallace ran on the newly minted American Independent Party, which is the same party that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is running on in 2024.
Wallace was a tremendous spoiler in 1968, but not because he is the most recent third-party candidate to win Electoral votes. His idea wasn’t actually to win the Electoral count, but to split the vote such that no candidate would win a majority, “which would then throw the decision to the House of Representatives.”
He got tremendous support across the country, with polls showing support for him at 20% just before the election. The states Wallace won were nearly all won by Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, but Republican Richard Nixon didn’t mind. He won 301 to 191 in the presidential race that mattered in 1968, after all.
Wallace was a lifelong Democrat, who appealed to the Democrat base across the country that felt disaffected by the schism in the party and the candidate that they hadn’t voted for, but that had been foisted upon them. It would be hard to argue that this wasn’t influential in Nixon flipping the vast majority of the country toward Republicans in 1968, or that millions of Democrats aren’t contemplating an RFK vote at this very moment for the same reasons.
There are surely many differences between 1968 and now. But politically speaking, if American history repeats, rhymes, or even speaks the same language of 1968, it doesn’t bode well for Democrats in the fall.