The United States presidential election, 1968 was held on 5 November 1968. The election, held at the height of the counterculture movement and the Vietnam War, saw the Republican Party run Richard Nixon as the "law and order" candidate who promised to provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. Nixon appealed to the "silent majority" of Americans, and he was popular for promising to enact a policy of Vietnamization, the phased withdrawal of US forces from Southeast Asia. The Democratic Party ran Vice President Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate after the unpopular Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to run for re-election. The Democratic Party had split into factions as a result of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, with the segregationist Southern Democrats forming the American Independent Party (led by George Wallace of Alabama) to run on a reactionary platform, the New Deal Democrats electing Humphrey as their nominee, and the New Left Democrats initially supporting George McGovern before he was defeated in the Democratic primary. The American Independent Party swept the Deep South, splitting the Democratic vote and rendering the Solid South useless during the election, and Nixon won the election with 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191 votes and Wallace's 46 votes.
Results[]
Richard Nixon/Spiro Agnew - 301 votes
Hubert Humphrey/Edmund Muskie - 191 votes
George Wallace/Curtis LeMay - 46 votes
 United States presidential election
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| Preceded by: 1964 |
1968 | Succeeded by: 1972 |