1968 United States presidential election in Virginia

1968 United States presidential election in Virginia

← 1964 November 5, 1968 1972 →
Turnout50.1% (voting age)[1]
 
Nominee Richard Nixon Hubert Humphrey George Wallace
Party Republican Democratic American Independent
Home state New York[a] Minnesota Alabama
Running mate Spiro Agnew Edmund Muskie Curtis LeMay
Electoral vote 12 0 0
Popular vote 590,319 442,387 320,272
Percentage 43.41% 32.53% 23.55%

County and Independent City Results

President before election

Lyndon B. Johnson
Democratic

Elected President

Richard Nixon
Republican

The 1968 United States presidential election in Virginia took place on November 5, 1968. All 50 states and the District of Columbia were part of the 1968 United States presidential election. Virginia voters chose twelve electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president of the United States.

For over sixty years Virginia had had the most restricted electorate in the United States due to a cumulative poll tax and literacy tests.[2] Virginia would be almost entirely controlled by the conservative Democratic Byrd Organization for four decades,[3] although during the Organization's last twenty years of controlling the state it would direct many Virginia voters away from the national Democratic Party due to opposition to black civil rights and to the fiscal liberalism of the New Deal.[4] After the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections the state's electorate would substantially expand since the lower classes were no longer burdened by poll taxes. At the same time, the postwar Republican trend of the Northeast-aligned Washington D.C. and Richmond suburbs, which had begun as early as 1944, would accelerate[5] and become intensified by the mobilisation of working-class Piedmont whites against a national Democratic Party strongly associated with black interests.[6]

  1. ^ "Population Estimates and Projections" (PDF).
  2. ^ Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. Yale University Press. pp. 178–181. ISBN 0-300-01696-4.
  3. ^ Key, Valdimer Orlando (1949). Southern Politics in State and Nation. pp. 20–25.
  4. ^ Ely, James W. The crisis of conservative Virginia: the Byrd organization and the politics of massive resistance. p. 16. ISBN 0870491881.
  5. ^ Atkinson, Frank B. (2006). The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Two-party Competition in Virginia, 1945-1980. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780742552098.
  6. ^ Phillips, Kevin P. (1969). The Emerging Republican Majority. pp. 260–266. ISBN 0870000586.


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