All three Democratic presidential losses in the Eighties were caused by centrism.

[Ken Burch]

38. ANY Dem would have lost big time in the gamed election of '72.

McGovern mainly lost big because of

A)The Eagleton situation(made worse by other Dem senators not only refusing to be on the ticket, but going public with the refusal...humiliating McGovern when he had done nothing to any of them to deserve the public slight).

B)Nixon's China trip...a pointless excursion that somehow made the voters forget we were still in an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

C)The "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion" line that Robert Novak quoted an unnamed midwestern Catholic Dem senator as using on McGovern...years later, Novak revealed that it was Thomas Eagleton himself who had said that...which suggests that Eagleton may have leaked his own mental health records just to submarine McGovern and force him to be an asshole by kicking Eagleton off of the ticket.

D)The vicious ads Hubert Humphrey(who already knew he was out of contention by then)ran in the California primary attacking McGovern on defense...ads the Nixon campaign quoted verbatim in the fall race. Humphrey stabbed McGovern in the back on that issue and had no justification for doing so, since McGovern had worked harder than anybody else in the fall of 1968 to get peace Dems to support the Humphrey/Muskie ticket and had been Humphrey's loyal legislative ally on many, many issues.

Humphrey or Muskie or Scoop Jackson or Reuben Askew would have done badly that year too. Nixon's "dirty tricks team" was going to make sure of it. The platform we ran on would have been irrelevant...an anti-choice "law and order" "we can win in Vietnam" candidate would have gone down in flames just as badly as McGovern did.