But Humphrey did not lose in 1968 because the Left stayed home. Most of the anti-war left consisted of white, middle-class, college-educated voters (you had to be 21 to vote in the U.S. until 1971) who went ahead and voted for Humphrey despite his record. Indeed, Humphrey won voters under the age of 30 with 47% to Nixon’s 38%. The ranks of the SDS were quite large, and reached about 100,000 at its height in the late 1960s. That 100,000 (let’s presume they all stayed home on Election Day) might give Humphrey the chance to win Ohio (where he lost to Nixon by about 90,000 votes), but not Nixon’s home state of California (where Humphrey lost by 240,000 votes). Humphrey needed at least both states to win the election.
In fact, Humphrey and his staff felt they neutralized the protest vote by the fall of 1968. They were more concerned with the Independent Party candidate and Alabama Governor George Wallace, whose racism, support for Jim Crow segregation, and opposition to the Civil Rights Act resonated with Southern whites, an essential constituency of the New Deal coalition. Wallace also appealed to working-class and middle-class whites across the country, but Humphrey’s campaign feared his appeal to blue-collar voters in particular.
When I interviewed Humphrey’s speechwriter Ted Van Dyk for my book, he told me how stunned he was by the support Wallace received among union workers. Wallace’s inroads on labor in the early fall of 1968, an essential constituency of the Humphrey campaign given Humphrey’s support for labor unions since the 1940s, surely cost him thousands of votes. Humphrey lost in part because Wallace (and Nixon) peeled the southern vote from the New Deal coalition. Humphrey tried to neutralize Wallace through coded “law and order” language, saying in September 1968 that Black Power activists such as “the Stokely Carmichaels—extremists of the left and the right—will not have their way and we will not allow them to terrorize or stampede Americans.” But this undermined his legacy as a civil rights champion and failed to wound Wallace.
Humphrey also came out against the war too late. Humphrey had warned Lyndon Johnson in February 1965 that the war would be a quagmire, that it would jeopardize his Great Society; but he fell in line and became the loyal vice president when American troops arrived in Da Nang one month later. Humphrey announced his candidacy on April 27, 1968, and up to the end of September, he remained committed to the war. Reeling from the fallout of the Democratic Convention, feeling his continued attachment to LBJ would cost him the presidency and needing the peace vote, Humphrey announced on September 30, 1968 his support for “a specific timetable” for an American withdrawal from Vietnam. While he rejected a “unilateral withdrawal,” it was the beginning of the end of Humphrey’s Vietnam.