1972 United States presidential election (Bobby)

The 1972 United States presidential election was the 47th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 7, 1972. Incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon defeated Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, receiving 399 of 538 electoral votes (one of which was pledged to Nixon but given to Libertarian party nominee John Hospers by a faithless elector in Virginia).

Nixon swept aside challenges from two Republican representatives in the 1972 Republican primaries to win renomination. McGovern, who had played a significant role in changing the Democratic nomination system after the 1968 election, mobilized the anti–Vietnam War movement and other liberal supporters to win his party's nomination. Among the candidates he defeated were early front-runner Edmund Muskie, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey, Governor George Wallace, and Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first African American person to run for a major party's presidential nomination.

Nixon emphasized the strong economy and his success in foreign affairs, while McGovern ran on a platform calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam War, and the institution of a guaranteed minimum income. Nixon maintained a large, and consistent, lead in polling. Separately, Nixon's reelection committee broke into the Watergate complex to wiretap the Democratic National Committee's headquarters, a scandal that would later be known as "Watergate". McGovern's campaign was originally abandoned by most Democrats, however it would be Robert F. Kennedy's adamant support of McGovern that would bring publicity to the McGovern Campaign. McGovern rose in the polls after he stopped campaigning to attend the funeral of Randy Farenthold, a relative of Frances.

Nixon won the election in a landslide, taking 54.9% of the popular vote and carrying 399 electoral votes, while being the first Republican to sweep the South. McGovern took 43.0% of the popular vote, while John G. Schmitz of the American Independent Party won 1.4% of the vote. Nixon received over 9 million more votes than McGovern, and he holds the record for the fourth widest popular vote margin in any post–World War II United States presidential election, behind Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and the record for the second widest raw vote margin in a presidential election, behind Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The 1972 presidential election was the first since the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, further expanding the electorate. Within two years of the election, both Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned from office: the former in August 1974, due to Watergate; the latter in October 1973, due to a separate corruption charge. Gerald Ford succeeded Agnew as vice president, then, in the following year, succeeded Nixon as president, making him the only U.S. president in history not to be elected to the office on a presidential ticket. Nixon was the only person in American history to resign the presidency. He almost faced impeachment after the Watergate scandal.

Despite this election delivering Nixon's greatest electoral triumph, Nixon later wrote in his memoirs that "it was one of the most frustrating and in many ways the least satisfying of all".