"We haven’t bled enough. It’s never enough for these sons of bitches."

[BlueMTexpat]

78. We agree about much more than we disagree,

I am happy to say.

But when you call unions "mainstream elements of the Dem establishment" (as you did in your first post), yet do not see a candidate who strongly supported unions in 1968 as progressive, I have to scratch my head in wonder.

Yes, it was the war that was the issue that was out front and most divisive. But anti-war proponents as well as "mainstream" Dems such as union members were able to make common cause around RFK for the most part - until his tragic assassination. No, the principal factor in Humphrey's loss in 1968 was not that he wasn't progressive nor was it because he was not charismatic. Revulsion at chaotic events during the Dem Convention in Chicago had caused many in the "mainstream" to see A-W protesters as enemies of the State and Southern antipathy towards Johnson's espousal of civil rights had caused "Southern Democrats" (for the most past RINOs, as we saw later when the same coalitions also voted for Reagan in 1980) to defect in large numbers to third party-candidate, George Wallace.

Humphrey actually received 42.7% of the popular vote, while Nixon received 43.42% so the election was very close numerically. But it was the wholesale defection of the South to Wallace that was the deciding factor in Nixon's plurality win. http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968