Scores On This Historic Day: November 5, 1968, Richard Nixon Is Elected President

November 5, 1968: Eight years after losing one of the closest Presidential elections, former Vice President Richard Nixon wins one that's nearly as close. The Republican nominee wins 301 Electoral Votes, with 43.4 percent of the popular vote. With the incumbent, President Lyndon Johnson, having dropped out of the race, the Democratic Party nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who won 191 Electoral Votes, with 42.7 percent of the vote.

Former Governor George Wallace of Alabama ran a 3rd-party candidacy based on racism, crime and anti-Communism, and won 5 States (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, plus 1 Electoral Vote in South Carolina) for 46 Electoral Votes, with 13.5 percent of the vote.

Nixon's popular vote advantage, not that it mattered, was just 512,000 votes. (He lost to John F. Kennedy by 118,000 votes in 1960.) Wallace did not win the following States, but almost certainly threw them from Humphrey to Nixon: Alaska, California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin. That's 197 Electoral Votes. If Humphrey had gotten even 40 percent of those, 79, he would have won, 270-222-46.

Johnson had stopped the bombing of North Vietnam on October 31. But the Paris Peace Talks stalled anyway. Nixon had a 30-point poll lead on Humphrey after the Conventions in August. In the last week, the polls showed a statistical dead heat. Someone wrote at the time that, if the election had been the next day, Humphrey would have won.

Think about what that would have meant. We don't know when he would have ended the Vietnam War, or how, but he wouldn't have kept it going for 4 more years, just so he could use it as an election issue again in 1972, like Nixon did. Certainly, there would have been no Cambodian Incursion in 1970, meaning no Kent State Massacre, and no "Killing Fields."

Humphrey certainly wouldn't have been as paranoid as Nixon, and wouldn't have had the war to be paranoid over. When the "Pentagon Papers" were published in 1971, Nixon started his "Plumbers" unit, to "stop leaks." That led directly to what was originally known as "the Watergate matter." Humphrey and his people wouldn't have committed any of the crimes that eventually fell under the umbrella term "Watergate."

The good things Nixon did? In 1970, he heavily increased spending on health care, and signed into law the creations of the Environmental Protection Agency (and the accompanying Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act), and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) -- both ideas proposed by Democratic Senators who ended up running for President in 1972 (Henry Jackson of Washington and George McGovern of South Dakota, respectively), but Nixon signed them into law, thus taking those accomplishments away. It was both good policy and good politics on his part. Surely, Humphrey would have had no trouble signing them into law as well.

Would Humphrey have made overtures to Red China, as Nixon did? I doubt it: "Only Nixon can go to China" has become a phrase meaning that only someone who was once so incredibly opposed to an issue could seriously tackle it. Nixon also "triangulated" China and the Soviet Union against each other, and got the Soviet Premier, Leonid Brezhnev, to sign the SALT treaty in 1972. Humphrey could have gotten an agreement with Brezhnev, but not with Mao Zedong. (Mao's fatal illness would also have been an obstacle to this: He died in 1976, in what would have been the last 4 months of Humphrey's 2nd term.)

Would Humphrey have been re-elected in 1972? His health hadn't yet become an issue, although he developed cancer in 1976, and chose not to make a 4th run for the Presidency, and died in 1978.

But a Humphrey Administration might have given Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, an additional 4 years following his half-hearted attempt at the Republican nomination in 1968, to become the leader of the conservative movement (as actually happened after 1972, once Nixon couldn't run again). With California, much of the rest of the West, and the South (which had hated Humphrey since his 1948 election to the Senate because of his support of civil rights) in his pocket, and with the Democrats possibly "growing stale in power" after 12 years, maybe the slogan, already old when Reagan was elected in 1980, "It's time for a change," would have worked in this alternate 1972.

But the problems Nixon faced in 1973 and 1974 before his forced resignation over Watergate were hard enough for an intelligent man like him. For Reagan, who was, to put it politely, not as smart as Nixon? (Or Humphrey, or LBJ, or RFK.) He would have botched the recession that began in late 1973. And the Yom Kippur War? That was one of the moments between the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall that could have brought us into World War III. Nixon had Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, with his "shuttle diplomacy." Reagan would have had... Who? Alexander Haig? That wouldn't have been good. George Schultz? That might have worked.

Presuming a Reagan elected in 1972 didn't get us into World War III, then, with his own scandals (just as he had in the 1980s), particularly with the recession raging, he wouldn't have been able to thread the needle, and he would have lost in 1976, especially if Jimmy Carter ran as a moral leader as he did in real life. Only this time, with the conservative movement completely discredited, Carter might have won in 1980 even with the Iran Hostage Crisis -- or, at the least, would not have lost nearly as badly.

Republican Presidents since might have included George H.W. Bush, but not George W., who went out of his way to be more like Reagan than his father. Bob Dole? John McCain? Mitt Romney? Maybe. Donald Trump? Not a chance: The American people would not have elected a celebrity again, especially one so dumb, he made Reagan look like Albert Einstein.

Democratic Presidents after Carter? Probably not Ted Kennedy. Bill Clinton? Maybe. Barack Obama? Maybe. Somebody else? Who knows.