# George McGovern George S. McGovern (1922–2012) was a South Dakota Democratic Senator (1963-1981), the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee who lost in a 49-state landslide to incumbent [[Richard Nixon]], and the operational symbol — for the right-wing political tradition that has invoked him for 50 years afterward — of "Democratic liberal candidate too progressive to be electorally viable." McGovern was a World War II B-24 bomber pilot (35 combat missions over Europe, Distinguished Flying Cross), a former history professor, and one of the leading anti-Vietnam-War voices in the U.S. Senate from 1965 onward. His 1972 nomination came through the post-1968 **McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms** that he himself had chaired — the Democratic Party rules changes that shifted nomination-power from party-leadership-controlled state-delegation processes to primary-and-caucus-based delegate selection. The reforms — substantially designed to prevent a recurrence of the 1968 Chicago disaster — opened the party to insurgent candidacies like McGovern's own. His campaign was wrecked by the **Eagleton crisis**: McGovern's first VP pick, Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton, was revealed in late July 1972 to have undergone earlier electroshock treatment for clinical depression. McGovern initially declared he stood "1,000 percent" behind Eagleton, then dropped him from the ticket — a sequence the media treated as catastrophically mishandled. The general-election loss was overwhelming: 520-17 EV, 60.7% to 37.5%. McGovern returned to the Senate, lost his 1980 reelection bid to Reagan-wave Republican James Abdnor, and spent his post-Senate decades on humanitarian-and-food-policy work (he was UN Global Ambassador on World Hunger 2001-2012). He died in October 2012, weeks before Obama's reelection. ## Right-wing relevance McGovern is one of the most operationally invoked Democratic figures in contemporary right-wing memory. The "**McGovern Democrat**" framing — used by Republican strategists for 50 years to attack subsequent Democratic candidates as too-liberal-to-be-electorally-viable — is structurally the same framing the contemporary right deploys against [[Bernie Sanders]], [[Elizabeth Warren]], AOC, and other progressive Democratic figures. McGovern himself in his later years repeatedly objected to the framing's accuracy (his actual 1972 positions were more moderate than the framing suggests), but the operational utility of "McGovern Democrat" as a Republican attack frame has remained constant. The McGovern-Fraser reforms are also operationally important: by opening the Democratic Party to insurgent primary-driven candidacies, they produced both the Carter 1976 candidacy and (much later) the Sanders 2016 insurgency. ## Connections - [[Richard Nixon]] — 1972 opponent; the landslide victor. - [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] — Earlier Vietnam-policy figure whose escalation McGovern opposed. - [[Hubert Humphrey]] — 1968 Democratic predecessor and continuing-rival within the party. ## See also - [[1972 Presidential Election]] — McGovern's loss. ---