1968 United States presidential election in New York
The 1968 United States presidential election in New York took place on November 5, 1968. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 1968 United States presidential election. New York voters chose 43 electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president. New York was won by incumbent DemocraticVice PresidentHubert Humphrey, who was running against former Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. Hubert Humphrey ran with Maine SenatorEdmund Muskie for vice president, and Nixon ran with Maryland GovernorSpiro Agnew. Former and future Alabama Governor George Wallace ran a strong third-party insurgent campaign as a Southern populist with his American Independent Party. Humphrey took 49.76% of the vote to Nixon's 44.30%, a victory margin of 5.46%. Wallace, a mostly Southern-oriented candidate, came in a distant third, with 5.29%. He did best in suburban and exurban counties around New York, and reached double figures in some wholly Italian-American precincts. In these, Wallace's pro-segregation stance was popular due to African-Americans taking over the national Democratic Party locally; however in the inner cities and upstate counties his views were seen as repugnant. New York weighed in for this election as 7% more Democratic than the national average. The presidential election of 1968 was a very multi-partisan election for New York, with almost 6% of the electorate voting for Third Parties. In typical form for the time, the highly populated centers of New York City, Buffalo, and Albany, voted Democratic, while the smaller counties in New York turned out for Nixon as the Republican candidate. Despite Nixon winning a strong majority of the state's counties, Humphrey's dominant performance in massively populated New York City provided him with his statewide victory, receiving 60.6% of the vote in the five boroughs to Nixon's 33.9%, a 26.7 percent Democratic victory margin in the City of New York amounting to a raw vote advantage for Humphrey of 695,722 votes, providing all of Humphrey's 370,538 statewide vote advantage. Humphrey won the election in New York with a strong 5% margin. The election results in New York represent a trend in the national mentality towards progressive politics, resulting from nationwide emergence of the hippie counterculture, the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., numerous demonstrations in opposition to the Vietnam War, and the violent confrontation between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Humphrey was seen by many as promising to continue the reformist legacy of President Johnson, and this garnered him much support by liberal voters across America. Nationwide, the election of 1968 was very contentious across the United States. Nixon, running on a largely socially conservative agenda, was able to attain victory nationwide with less than 1% popular lead on Humphrey, while the historically one-party Democratic stronghold of the Deep South turned out en masse for their own George Wallace, who was spearheading the new American Independent Party. This was the first time since Samuel J. Tilden won the state in 1876 that New York voted for a losing Democratic candidate. , this is the last election where New York had the highest number of electoral votes. As Nixon declared New York as his state of legal residence at the time, this marked the second most recent cycle in which a major party's presidential nominee declared New York as his home state only to change it to another state in the succeeding cycle as Nixon would change his home state back to his native California before the 1972 presidential election. This would happen again in 2016 when Trump stood for president as a resident of New York but changed his home state to Florida before the 2020 election.
