Tag: George McGovern

The Story: This week, in a two day television extravaganza, the top twenty candidates for the Democratic Party's nomination for President come together for a...

A big problem is messaging requires lying. He spoke of a Republican Party that didn’t exist. They're also working hard on superdelegate reforms, specifically ways of making the primary more democratic, but keeping the delegates in reserve in case of emergency: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who failed to get the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has campaigned to end the voting power of most superdelegates, keeping the issue alive. McGovern only won one state, Nixon took the other 49. Superdelegates were instituted as a way of preventing the party from nominating candidates that can't win the Presidency, at least in theory. Of course we all know how that turned out: She lost the primary despite her superdelegate advantage, and Barack Obama went on to win the Presidency. As a Democrat I don't know, practically, what changing the the way superdelegates work will accomplish. Historically superdelegates have always voted with the candidate that won the most votes, and there's not a lot of hard evidence to suggest that the perception of an advantage is enough to help one candidate or hurt another. If we'd made super-delegates vote with the delegate winners of their state, in straight proportion, the outcome wouldn't have changed. No matter how you sliced it, Sanders got fewer votes, and thus a lot fewer delegates.

In 1972, George McGovern of South Dakota was the Democratic Party's nominee for president. Both ran campaigns with strong visions for what they wanted America to be. And while Mondale says McGovern's campaign looks good through the lens of history, "It's not the campaign I would have run." Mondale tells me he believes McGovern made a mistake in how he executed the message of his campaign; perhaps too liberal at a time when the country was shifting to more conservative politics. Four years later.....1976.....Mondale is elected vice president on the ticket with former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Four years later, in 1980, they are defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan and his running mate George Bush. I think we had to open up the party. But Mondale tells me there were people in his own campaign who questioned his vice presidential choice. Sometimes after that 84 election, Mondale ran into George McGovern. Mondale asked his friend a question; "George, how long did it take you to get over your defeat in running for president?