No, Richard Nixon’s 1968 Election Win Wasn’t ‘A Landslide’

Amid calls for President Joe Biden to withdraw as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, many people are drawing comparisons to 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declined to run for reelection, citing conflicts caused by the Vietnam war, violent inner-city protests, and widespread poverty. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, earned the nomination and ended up losing to Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee.

On July 18, the X account for MSNBC’s Morning Joe posted a clip of hosts Joe Scarborough  and Mika Brzezinski discussing the 1968 election. Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter for the New York Times Magazine and author of the 1619 Project, quote-tweeted the clip and said “Yes. And Nixon won in a landslide.” She appears to have deleted the tweet.

Jones falsely conflated the 1968 and 1972 elections. In 1968, Nixon defeated Humphrey by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College but won the popular vote by only about 500,000 votes, a margin of 0.7 percent. Nixon’s “landslide victory” came in 1972, when he won 49 states and more than 60 percent of the popular vote against George McGovern.

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