United States presidential election in Texas, 1968

← 1964

November 5, 1968

1972 →


Nominee	Hubert Humphrey	Richard Nixon	George Wallace
Party	Democratic	Republican	American Independent
Home state	Minnesota	New York	Alabama
Running mate	Edmund Muskie	Spiro Agnew	Curtis LeMay
Electoral vote	25	0	0
Popular vote	1,266,804	1,227,844	584,269
Percentage	41.1%	39.9%	19.0%

County results

Humphrey

30-39%

40-49%

50-59%

60-69%

70-79%

80-89%

Wallace

30-39%

40-49%

Nixon

30-39%

40-49%

50-59%

60-69%

70-79%

President before election

Lyndon B. Johnson
Democratic

Elected President

Richard Nixon
Republican

Humphrey

Wallace

Nixon

Lyndon B. Johnson
Democratic

Richard Nixon
Republican

The 1968 United States presidential election in Texas was held on November 5, 1968. The Democratic Party candidate, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey, very narrowly carried Texas with 41.4% of the vote, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. However he narrowly lost the general election to Republican candidate, former Vice President Richard Nixon. This was the first occasion when Texas had not backed the winning Presidential candidate since voting for John W. Davis in 1924.

When Texas “favorite son” Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election in March, it was generally thought that the Republican Party would have a good chance of winning the Lone Star State despite losing by 27 percentage points in 1964, and the presence of former Alabama Governor George Wallace running as a candidate for the American Independent Party, a far-right political party. Wallace was known for his pro-segregationist politics, which would win him five southern states in the general election. However, in Humphrey’s favor was the abolition of the poll tax via the Twenty-Fourth Amendment that permitted previously disfranchised Mexican-Americans to register and vote for the first time. The Mexican-American South Texas counties of Duval, Webb and Jim Hogg had been among the four most Democratic in the nation in 1964, and despite polling fewer than eighteen thousand out of a state total exceeding three million votes, those three counties would provide over thirty percent of Humphrey’s ultimate winning plurality and Duval was again the most Democratic county in the nation.

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