1970 Union State presidential election (Finanzamt)

The 1970 Union State presidential election was the 25th quadrennial presidential election, held on Monday, August 10 1970. Incumbent New Union President Richard Nixon defeated Progressive challenger and US Senator for New England Edmund Muskie as well as US Senator for Trinity Lyndon Johnson of the newly established New People's Party in the first round, the first ever candidate to do so since 1958. Though they were able to avoid a debacle akin to their 1966 convention with no second round of voting needed to determine the nominee, the Progressives remained divided as ever between more radical elements spearheaded by the Young Progressives and a more moderate faction loyal to the Progressive National Committee. While the presumptive nominee Muskie was firmly in the latter camp, many anti-communist hardliners feared he would be too lenient in his treatment of socialists and other radicals in the YPs and the broader party, a concern not remedied by the proposed nomination of Senator Scoop Jackson as Muskie's running mate. By the beginning of 1970, negotiations between Muskie and his opponents had broken down, resulting in Senate Majority Leader Johnson and his allies breaking away from the Progressives to found the New People's Party, which subsequently nominated Johnson and formerly Progressive Representative Emanuel Celler for President and Vice President.

President Nixon, whose popularity was lower than that of previous Progressive Presidents Wallace and Reuther but nevertheless stable and on the rise, secured his party's nomination without competition. However, Vice President Kennan had publicly announced his intention to not seek re-election, citing familial matters, forcing Nixon and NUP leadership to pick a new running mate. General Secretary Ted Agnew, who had been considered an early candidate himself, eventually proposed Harry Byrd, the Governor of Liberty, who eagerly accepted the nomination. Nixon and his aides subsequently attempted to install Byrd as the new Vice President before the election, but the nomination was rejected by the Progressive-held National Assembly. The executive thus attempted to influence and pressure several legislators into compliance, an undertaking which would later be revealed as the Byrd Affair by journalists of the Columbiaville Herald.

Major campaign issues included foreign policy, where Muskie was lambasted by both Nixon and Johnson for his, albeit cautious, criticism of the Union State's interventionism in Africa and attacked him for supposedly being too conciliatory towards the EUSPR. Furthermore, the rising crime rate and uptick in political violence, oftentimes originating from the YPs, proved another weakness of the Progressives. Conversely, both the NPP and Progressives were united in opposition to Nixon's economic policy of New Pragmatism and vowed a return to more traditional welfare state, though the administration's reforms had not been as market liberal as some critics had previously feared. Nevertheless, analysts both contemporary and modern agree that the Progressive-New People's split facilitated the President's re-election, with the left's time and resources being diverted toward attacking each other instead of the incumbent government and allowing for Nixon to win an absolute majority of votes in the first round.

This triumph was the first re-election of a conservative incumbent President since 1906, when Elihu Root was carried to victory by an electorate still shocked by the assassination of President Borden. It was also seen as a confirmation of the success Nixon's New New Union policy had had in distancing the party and the American right wing from the King dictatorship, as the NUP also won a majority in the National Assembly for the first time since its inception with its victory in the legislative elections of the same year, finally breaking the Progressives' dominance over US politics and re-establishing conservatism as a viable political outlook. Finally, Byrd was the second Vice President to be elected as the running mate of an incumbent President who had previously chosen another person as his deputy, a feat then only achieved by William Seward in 1854.

Nixon and Byrd would be inaugurated on September 1, 1970 as the last President and Vice President of the Union State prior to its dissolution.

Background
With the end of the dictatorship of William Mackenzie King, the Union State political landscape was initially dominated by the Progressive Party, which, as the successor organization to the United Democratic Front, was credited with initiating the return to democracy. Furthermore, sweeping expansion of the welfare state by Presidents Wallace and Reuther similar in scale to those of the Works administration continued to cement the Progressive leadership's exorbitant popularity. In the meantime, a cordon sanitaire was erected around not only the far-right Nationalist Party, in which most hard-line King supporters as well as radical libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists had taken refuge, but also the by far more moderate New Union Party, which had been registered as the official successor organisation to the Nationalists for financial reasons, a decision Nixon aide Bob Haldeman would later refer to as the "worst possible course of action we could have taken", accusing NUP founder John M. Feeney of "holding back America's conservative movement for decades" (Haldeman, in this same interview, would then go on describing Feeney as a "know-nothing" whose talent in filmmaking had "given him allusions of grandeur detrimental to the very core of our party" and saying that "such an elitist big shot was what you'd expect from the ranks of a well-to-do Progressive chapter"). Nonetheless, Progressives' unbroken control of both the Presidency would soon come to an end with the 1966 presidential election, allowing the New Unionists to, for the first time, seize the Executive Mansion amidst what analysts dubbed a "perfect storm" of circumstances. In addition to the natural fatigue 16 years of Progressive government had caused among the American people, an economic downturn had begun in the second quarter of 1965 and was largely credited to Progressive economic policy. Inflation rates reached 6%, unemployment was on the rise for the first time since the end of the Great War, and the Union State's GDP shrunk by as much as 1.6%. Coinciding with this recession was the ascendance of hardliner Mikhail Suslov as leader of the EUSPR, marking an end to the policy of détente traditionally pursued by Progressive administrations towards the socialist state, and, in the eyes of many Americans, its failure. Combined with the lacking incumbent advantage and charisma of Progressive candidate Tommy Douglas, who had almost been denied his party's nomination during a chaotic national convention by frustrated anti-war Progressives, NUP challenger Richard Nixon was able to win a close victory in the second round on a platform of economic reform and increased hawkishness. Despite this triumph, NUP leadership feared their position to be anything but stable, with such paranoia most prominently exhibited by the President himself. The programme of New Pragmatism, despite its success in bringing about renewed economic growth, appeared to cause widespread backlash among working Americans, who, during the 1950s and 60s, had become accustomed to the advantages of the Progressive welfare state. Cuts to pensions, healthcare and education proved especially controversial as they were used to finance tax reductions and subsidies for industrial goods, as was the increase in the number of troops stationed abroad, with many believing the administration was steering them into a forever war. These fears were only furthered with the elections of 1968, during which the Progressives managed to preserve their Senate majority while making remarkable gains in the House despite ever-growing internal divisions. As such, politicians and pundits alike saw the election of 1970 as a referendum on the future of Union State politics as a whole, with the question of whether Nixon's election had been a mere outlier and America would return to the natural state of Progressive government, or if the American right had truly emancipated itself from its history and would prove a competitive political option.

New Union Nomination
Incumbent President Nixon was unanimously renominated by the New Union Executive Committee in February of 1970, with Governor of Liberty Harry Byrd announced as his running mate simultaneously. The latter was only nominated after current Vice President Kennan had announced his intention to not seek re-election out of unspecified concerns for his "family and well-being, both physical and psychological" on August 14, 1969 (the authenticity of these claims, however, is disputed, as some historians claim Kennan had ulterior motives relating to the HITP). The day after Kennan's statement, the NUP Executive Committee (NUEC) met for an emergency session under the leadership of General Secretary Ted Agnew to determine a successor. While Agnew himself was initially proposed as a candidate himself, the committee members eventually had the choice between Byrd and Home Affairs Minister Stanfield, the latter losing the final vote 13 to 9 due to the NUEC's opposition to his liberal views on civil rights. Immediately after the decision was made on January 4, the Special Election Committee, a task force to increase the Governor's standing on the federal level, was founded by General Secretary Agnew. Its chairman, young political operative Tom C. Huston, who had already aided Nixon during his 1966 campaign, proposed a plan named Operation Mockingbird calling for Kennan's immediate resignation and his replacement with Byrd. Aware of the fact that the Progressive Party with its majority in both chambers of the Assembly was likely to block the Governor's ascendance to the post, the memo also included the recommendations to exert pressure on a selection of leading Progressive legislators, including Senator Church of Columbia and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Broadbent.

Withdrawn candidates
Though not nearly as competitive as the 1966 primary season, the Progressive nomination process was nonetheless marked by deep divisions within the party. Though himself a member of the Progressive National Committee, Edmund Muskie was significantly more popular among the YPs and other left-wing factions than most other establishment Progressives due to his vocal criticism of Nixon on foreign policy, making him an early front-runner. His most serious opponent for the nomination was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, a favourite of moderate party members and independents alike, who overtook Muskie in polls shortly after announcing his candidature in June of 1969, yet quickly fell back to second place after a series of inauspicious appearances on the campaign trail and a Muksie advertising blitz criticizing Johnson's cooperative attitude towards President Nixon's legislative agenda. Other candidates were Mississippi Governor Fred Gray, who abandoned his campaign before the first primary, Matthew McHugh, who had been proposed as a compromise candidate for President in 1966, Senator Scoop Jackson and rock musician Frank Zappa, running a joke campaign to voice opposition to Jackson's hawkish foreign policy and mainly supported by Young Progressives dissatisfied with the other candidates. Muskie held a commanding lead in delegates after the first primaries, leading Jackson and McHugh to eventually withdraw ahead of the nominating convention, leaving only Johnson as a serious competitor. While he continued to struggle in standing up to Muskie's momentum, Johnson attracted a large following of Progressives alienated by radical outgrowths within their own youth organization, leading the Senator to further tap into the law-and-order rhetoric popularised by the incumbent President, combining it with attacks on Muskie's supposed softness on Communism both domestic and abroad. In the lead-up to the 1970 Progressive National Convention, Johnson thus began openly threatening the party leadership with a walk-out should he not be nominated for either the office of President or Vice President, with the conflict only intensifying when Muskie won the primary in Louisiana on January 16, securing an absolute majority of delegates. On the following day, the presumptive nominee arranged a meeting with the Senate Majority Leader in his office in the Capitol, during which he announced to him that Jackson would become his running mate. What Muskie had intended to be an olive branch to anti-communists only further enraged his opponent, with a livid Johnson dismissing Muskie a mere five minutes after their negotiations had commenced. Despite eleventh-hour attempts to sabotage Jackson at the convention on February 11, Muskie and his preferred nominee for Vice President were nominated on the first ballot, leading Johnson and his supporters to leave the Los Angeles Opera House early in order to register the New People's Party.

New People's Nomination
As its founder and figurehead, Johnson was nominated unanimously by the NPP as its candidate for President. Johnson and his aides were able to convince Vice-Chairman of the Progressive House Caucus Emanuel Celler to change his party affiliation and subsequently nominated him for Vice President.

Debates
According to an agreement between NUP and Progressive leadership made in early 1969, two televised debates between the major party candidates would be held leading up to the election, as had been the case in 1966. They would be broadcast by the major television networks UBC, UBS, and ABS, with each of them providing a moderator for a joint panel. Following Johnson's convention walk-out, it became increasingly clear that the NPP would play a serious role in the race for President, leading the networks to urge Progressive leadership into allowing its candidate to participate. However, as the PNC initially refused to recognize Johnson's party as anything but an illegitimate breakaway faction, no negotiations to adapt the format commenced before the first debate, which Nixon won decisively according to opinion polls. The aggressive attacks by Nixon direct at Muskie and the criticism many voters voiced concerning the exclusion of Johnson finally led Progressives to agreeing into inviting Johnson, who continued to give the performance best liked by voters (Muskie, though improved, still occupied the third place). Overall, however, the debates seemed to have had a rather minute effect on polling numbers and merely served to solidify the respective candidates' positions.

Polling
Polling was generally regarded as fairly accurate during the election, however, the support for Nixon was critically underestimated, leading many to believe the President would have to face Muskie or Johnson in a second round of voting.