Partisan Tricks and the Presidential Election

The recent revelations about Nixon undermining the Peace Talks with VietNam got me thinking about really scummy behavior on the part of political partisans.  Several of these rise to the level of gallows-worthy high treason.

1964:  Goldwater's jingoism and anti-New-Deal rhetoric didn't get support from many people.  But the ambiguous nature of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, just a few weeks before the election, raised support for Goldwater's aggressive, "bomb them back to the stone age" rhetoric on VietNam, and Johnson felt he had little choice but escalate.  Johnson won the election in a landslide.

1968: The VietNam war, which Johnson had been forced against his will to get involved in, seemed to be winding to a close and peace talks had been organized in Paris.  But Nixon succeeded in undermining them, by promising South Viet Nam a better deal, and they walked away.  Five years later, they settled for exactly the same deal as Johnson had worked out with the North, but with 22,000 more Americans and perhaps a hundred thousand more Vietnamese dead.  Johnson was prepared to use this against Nixon, but when it appeared that Nixon was going to lose anyway, he chose to avoid the strife that would have inevitably resulted, and he could bring the South back to the table afterwards. Nixon won the election by the closest margin we'd see until Bush v Gore in 2000.

1972: Watergate.

1980: Members of Reagan's staff met with the hostagetakers in Iran and encouraged them to defer releasing the hostages until after the election.  They did and the hostages were released 2 hours before the inaguration. Reagan's campaign was about Carter's fecklessness, largely based on the hostage situation--which the Reagan campaign had exacerbated.  This may have been the most consequential election in US history.  It was a very close election.

1988: Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who was furloughed from a Massachusetts prison during Dukakis's term as governor, committed several armed robberies and a rape.  The furlough program had been started by a Republican governor and expanded by another Republican governor to deal with Reagainite budget cutting, and was ended by Dukakis.  Nevertheless, Bush used it heavily against Dukakis and won.

2000: Even though the supreme court had ruled it illegal, Republican operatives engaged in caging, in which fradulent evidence is presented that voters have moved.  Republicans disenfranchised at least ten thousand mostly democratic voters in Florida.  The "butterfly ballot" in Broward county was designed by a republican operative who had switched parties two years before the election, and switched back shortly afterward.  at least 5000 people voted for Buchanan who meant to vote for Gore.  Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and recounts were blocked by the partisan supreme court.  By electoral college, this is the closest election in history, although Gore won the popular vote.  This is probably the second most consequential election, because it allowed Bush to cement and enlarge the damage caused by Reagan.  Bush's administration was likely the most corrupt in history and was certainly one of the more incompetent.

2004: numerous cases of caging and ballot box stuffing.  One Ohio precinct in a college community, which always votes strongly democrat, had more Bush votes than it had registered voters.  Ohio was close: 20 such precincts could swing the election.