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, 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.