McGovern speaking at a rally at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston, Texas, on October 16, 1972, during the final weeks of the campaign. The sign behind him says "Houston is McGovern Country".
McGovern ran on a platform of ending the Vietnam War and instituting guaranteed minimum incomes for the nation's poor. The Vietnam issue, which remained the one McGovern was most passionate about, did not work for him overall; a majority of the electorate thought that Nixon was a strong leader who would secure "peace with honor".McGovern, in contrast, was seen as too strident and too tied to radical elements of the anti-war movement.By 1972, Nixon's strategy of Vietnamization had resulted in the withdrawal of most U.S. troops, without appearing to have given in to the Communists, and thus popular dissatisfaction with the war did not accrue to McGovern's benefit.

Nixon's so-called "southern strategy" of reducing the pressure for school desegregation and otherwise restricting federal efforts on behalf of blacks had a powerful attraction to northern blue-collar workers as well as southerners. McGovern called the Watergate burglaries "the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler."

Issues and Strategies