United States presidential election, 1972

1968 ←

November 7, 1972

→ 1976

All 538 electoral votes of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win

Turnout	55.2% 5.7 pp

Nominee	Richard Nixon	George McGovern
Party	Republican	Democratic
Home state	California	South Dakota
Running mate	Spiro Agnew	Sargent Shriver (replacing Thomas Eagleton)
Electoral vote	520	17
States carried	49	1 + DC
Popular vote	47,168,710	29,173,222
Percentage	60.7%	37.5%

Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Nixon/Agnew, blue denotes the one won by McGovern/Shriver, gold is the electoral vote for Hospers/Nathan by a Virginia faithless elector. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.

President before election

Richard Nixon
Republican

Elected President

Richard Nixon
Republican

The United States presidential election of 1972, the 47th quadrennial presidential election was held on Tuesday, November 7, 1972. The Democratic Party’s nomination was eventually won by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who ran an anti-war campaign against Republican incumbent President Richard Nixon, but was handicapped by his outsider status, limited support from his own party, the perception of many voters that he was a left-wing extremist and the scandal that resulted from the stepping down of vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton.

Emphasizing a good economy and his successes in foreign affairs, such as coming near to ending American involvement in the Vietnam War and establishing relations with China, Nixon won the election in a landslide. Overall, he won 60.7% of the popular vote, a percentage only slightly lower than Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964, but with a larger margin of victory in the popular vote (23.2%), thus becoming the fourth largest in presidential election history. He received almost 18 million more popular votes than McGovern, the widest margin of any United States presidential election. McGovern only won the electoral votes in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. No candidate since has managed to equal or surpass Nixon’s total percentage or margin of the popular vote, and his electoral vote total and percentage have been surpassed only once, and his state total matched only once, by Ronald Reagan in 1984.

...
Wikipedia