Nixon and McGovern

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

Richard Nixon is back in vogue among Republicans, something that a younger me wouldn’t have thought possible. After all, a Nixon renaissance would require the right to lose its taste for small-government conservatism and to acquire a taste for criminality, which seemed unlikely.

 

But modern American politics is full of surprises, isn’t it?

 

Strange New Respect for the 37^th president is reportedly concentrated among younger right-wingers, presumably for the same reasons that antisemitism is. Both beliefs are proudly transgressive, a juvenile middle finger aimed at the pieties of liberal elders. And both are far removed from the historical events that made them taboo to begin with, creating a degree of emotional distance that older Republicans don’t share.

 

So it’s probably no coincidence that the most prominent Nixon admirer in the GOP is our conspicuously young, conspicuously amoral vice president.

 

Last month J.D. Vance marveled that a matter as minor as Watergate could sink a presidency and blamed the scandal on a “deep state” plot against Nixon, demonstrating the sociopathic contempt for norms and self-serving historical revisionism that’s required of any postliberal thought leader. Vance is also considerably more comfortable with central economic planning than Reaganites are, another not-so-coincidental hallmark of Nixonian statist Republicanism.

 

And, like Nixon himself in 1958, as the sitting vice president he’s the presumptive nominee of his party for president in the next election cycle.

 

I thought of Vance and Nixon this past weekend as I watched the co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America get grilled on Fox News Sunday about the kookiest elements in her party’s platform. Do you guys really want to abolish the Senate, anchor Shannon Bream asked DSA chief Megan Romer? Defund the Pentagon? Get rid of prisons? Erase America’s borders and grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants?

 

Sure do, Romer calmly replied, assenting to each provision individually as Bream rattled them off.

 

Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election but won eight years later and secured a second term in a landslide despite being an unethical Republican saddled with an unpopular war. A radicalized Democratic base made it easy for him by nominating George McGovern, a far-out-of-the-mainstream leftist. Now here we are again, perhaps, headed in that direction in 2028—except this time, in warming to the DSA, the left is trending toward a faction that makes McGovern look like Barry Goldwater.

 

Jonah Goldberg has a piece out today urging calm about the allegedly ascendant socialist menace. Americans still support free markets decisively, he notes, which is true. And for all the hype, the DSA still hasn’t scored any truly impressive electoral victories lately. Until it proves it can win in swing states or purple House districts, not just cerulean-blue strongholds like Manhattan, the commie takeover of the Democratic Party is mostly hot air.

 

Mostly. But if you’re watching the polls, you know that socialist Abdul El-Sayed has pulled ahead of Rep. Haley Stevens by double digits in each of the last four surveys of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Francesca Hong, the far-left option in Wisconsin’s Democratic race for governor, is up by 20 points or more in the two most recent polls there. Either might plausibly win the general election in an anti-Trump environment like the current one. And if America’s fortunes in Iran decline and/or gas prices climb higher, they might win easily.

 

Victories by El-Sayed or Hong would be treated by the DSA as proof of concept about their faction’s electability. If they can win in the Midwest, they can win anywhere. And if they can win anywhere, why shouldn’t one of their own be the Democratic nominee for president?

 

So while I take Jonah’s point, I can’t help thinking that a similar point—a Trumpist takeover is not imminent—could have been made in 2015 and would have felt equally plausible at the time. In reality, things move fast nowadays. Change happens quickly.

 

Modern American politics is full of surprises.

 

How likely are we to get Nixon vs. McGovern 2.0 in 2028?

 

The McGovern option.

 

Needless to say, there’s no scenario in which J.D. Vance carries 49 states with 60 percent of the popular vote in the next presidential election, as Nixon did in 1972. Our hyperpartisan country doesn’t have enough swing voters to produce landslides like that anymore. Democrats could nominate Hasan Piker and make him campaign in his Mao suit and he’ll still win 47 percent of the vote and every state to the left of Virginia. Van Jones and James Carville might howl about DSAers now, but they won’t be voting Republican in 2028, rest assured.

 

Oh, and Richard Nixon was rocking a 60 percent approval rating at some points during the 1972 campaign, another wildly unreachable benchmark today. Vance will be lucky to manage 45 percent in 2028.

 

Still, one can imagine a scenario in which the vice president faces a far-left challenger and defeats him or her comfortably, I think.

 

It would go something like this: Progressive voters unite in the primaries behind some neo-McGovern candidate while the rest of the Democratic electorate fractures among more mainstream options. Black voters and Biden dead-enders rally behind Kamala Harris. Technocratic neoliberal hearts flutter over Pete Buttigieg. Normies who prize electability and defeating Republicans at all costs tilt toward Josh Shapiro and Jon Ossoff (who’s suddenly on the left’s s--t list for having given a series of sensible “blue politician in a reddish state” answers to questions about culture-war flashpoints in a recently resurfaced clip from 2020).

 

We end up with a reprise of the 2020 Democratic primary, in other words, in which Bernie Sanders united the left and won several early primaries while the rest of the party splintered among the center-left candidates. That problem was eventually solved by the figure of Joe Biden, who seemed eminently electable by dint of his name recognition and long experience in Washington and who ended up running away with the South Carolina primary. Once he did, the other “normie” candidates took it as their cue to get behind him in the interest of preventing the far-left Sanders from winning the nomination.

 

There will be no Biden figure in 2028, though. The closest thing is Harris, another experienced former VP who stands to do well with the mostly black South Carolina primary electorate. But no one is confident in her electability after 2024. Buttigieg, meanwhile, is despised by the left, has struggled with black voters, and would face his own electability questions over the fact that he’s gay. And it’s anyone’s guess how Shapiro or Ossoff would perform as national candidates; conceivably they would destroy each other in their battle for the title of Most Electable Guy From a Must-Win Swing State.

 

There’s also a chance that the DSA’s neo-McGovern candidate will be more compelling than Sanders was, or at least better served by the politics of the moment. The worse the cost of living gets, the more appealing “eat the rich” populism might become even to normie Democrats in 2028. And Vance’s weakness as a politician might entice the Democratic base into taking risks in choosing a nominee that it wasn’t willing to entertain against an incumbent president with cultish support like Trump in 2020. The vice president is unlikable and will be hamstrung by having to defend unpopular policies that feed directly into voters’ Trump fatigue, making him ripe for defeat.

 

We don’t need to nominate the most electable candidate this time to win, DSAers will tell Democratic voters. We can nominate a warrior.

 

To support their case, they might point to the fact that—unlike the GOP of 1972—the modern Republican Party is plenty radical in its own right, making a radical leftist comparatively less objectionable to centrist voters. Or they might argue that the vice president’s own progressive economic sympathies require Democrats to nominate someone who can “outbid” him on policy from the left. If the party chooses a centrist like Harris or Shapiro, the working class might surmise that Vance will do just as much for them economically as his Democratic opponent would and will be considerably better on “law and order” priorities. Only by dazzling those working-class voters with a truly robust socialist economic agenda, the DSAers will claim, can they be wooed away from favoring the Republican for cultural reasons.

 

Maybe the centrist Democratic candidates will end up uniting too late behind a single champion in 2028, or maybe the neo-McGovern will build up too much steam early to be derailed the way Sanders was in 2020. However it plays out, he or she goes on to win the nomination—at which point the GOP launches a monthslong carpet-bombing campaign of advertising about the insanity of the DSA platform. I don’t support the most radical elements of that agenda, the neo-McGovern will swear, but swing voters either won’t believe them or won’t care. Who wants a president who’ll feel in any way beholden to a faction that wants to abolish prisons?

 

Vance ends up cruising to a 5-point victory, helped along by Carville types who can’t bring themselves to turn out for a left-wing Jacobin. Forced to choose between two nominees who are pro-criminal, albeit in different ways, American voters end up deciding that they’re better off choosing the one who won’t defund the police.

 

Even if a Vance win seems likely, that might not deter DSAers from pushing hard to nominate a candidate from within their own ranks. Read El-Sayed’s recent comments about putting “ogres on pikes” and you’ll understand that the socialist wing’s highest priority is flexing its muscles against establishment Democrats, not against Republicans. In 2020, one sensed that ousting Trump superseded all of their other political goals; in 2026, asserting control over their own party is the supreme imperative. Many would rather lose with a neo-McGovern than win with a Harris or Shapiro, I suspect, so long as that cements their faction’s primacy among other left-wing constituencies.

 

So: It’s Nixon versus McGovern again in 2028, then? Well … no, probably not.

 

2012, not 1972.

 

In the first place, the scenario I’ve sketched depends entirely on one or more major wins for socialist candidates this fall. If El-Sayed, Hong, and others wet the bed—especially in a cycle where mainstream Democrats are winning their own races easily—then the DSA’s electability argument is up in smoke. The party’s base might consider supporting a radical in 2028 if there’s some reason to believe he or she might beat Vance. If there isn’t, they won’t.

 

Beyond that, there’s an obvious question lurking. Who is the neo-McGovern who’ll supposedly unite the left in the next presidential primary? Bernie Sanders is 84. Zohran Mamdani is ineligible, having not been born in the United States. El-Sayed will have less than two years’ experience in elected office when the primaries begin, and in any event would be an impossibly heavy lift as a socialist Muslim in Trump-era America.

 

That leaves Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s never held statewide office and would need to overcome whatever “glass ceiling” hesitation remains among Americans about putting a woman in command of the military. Harris and Hillary Clinton couldn’t manage that against a figure as flawed as Trump despite running as “safe” establishment Democrats. AOC would have to find a way against Vance while pulling a truckload of baggage involving radicalism and “wokeness.”

 

To complicate matters further, there’s some reason already to believe that factionalism might make a socialist nominee broadly unacceptable to the Democratic base in a way that McGovern wasn’t in 1972. Black Democrats have never been keen on DSA types, as Sanders learned the hard way in 2016 and 2020 and as El-Sayed is finding out in his race against Stevens. Some black Democratic officials have also spoken up recently about being given short shrift by party leaders consumed with courting Latinos and accommodating the far left. If the 2028 primary plays out in such a way that African Americans end up feeling alienated from the socialist wing, a neo-McGovern nominee is a nonstarter.

 

In a recent piece for Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen ticked through the ways in which the DSA’s rise on the left resembles Trumpism’s rise on the right—and, more importantly for our purposes, a few in which it doesn’t. “The far left has no Fox News synchronizing base and elites,” they note. “In fact, it’s safe to assume the New York Times, The Atlantic and MS NOW will resist socialism, at least initially.” And Democratic voters have been more institutionalist than Republicans have historically, they note. Which I suppose is true, but seems considerably less true than it used to be when catastrophic ideas like court-packing are being kicked around.

 

My decidedly unscientific prediction is that we’re still one more presidential cycle away from socialists contending seriously for the Democratic nomination. (Again, assuming they prove they can win statewide in battleground races first.) Lacking a DSA Trump equivalent to galvanize the base toward radicalism, Democrats will probably give electability uber alles one more chance in 2028 by opting for an Ossoff or Shapiro—with the proviso that if they turn out not to be electable against J.D. Vance, the party’s days of playing it safe with its nominees are over.

 

That’s what happened to the GOP in 2012. Mitt Romney was a strange choice for a party in the grip of populist mania, but such was the right’s desire to oust Barack Obama that they heeded the advice of the Republican establishment and went with the “safe” electable option. (Whether they would have done so if Trump or some other demagogue had given them a true firebreathing populist alternative is anyone’s guess.) They were willing to compromise by nominating a guy they weren’t crazy about for the sake of winning. And then … he didn’t win.

 

That’s what’s waiting for the Democratic establishment in 2032 if a supposedly electable centrist can’t get it done two years from now.

 

In fact, if the DSA wing fails to produce a viable candidate in 2028, I wonder how many of its members might quietly (or not so quietly) root for a Vance victory for precisely that reason. Not only would another electoral failure by the Democratic establishment strengthen the argument for taking chances with a far-left nominee going forward, but it would fit the Marxist framework of “heightening the contradictions” to create popular appetite for radical change. If Americans aren’t miserable enough after a second Trump term to consider socialism, let’s see how they feel after an additional term of postliberal misery under J.D. “What’s the big deal about Watergate?” Vance.

 

There’s one amusing possibility we haven’t considered, though. What if we end up with Nixon vs. McGovern in 2028 … except with the two sides’ roles reversed?

 

The GOP isn’t the only party that could conceivably nominate a (former) vice president as the sane alternative to some alarmingly fringy opponent. For all of her faults, Kamala Harris at least doesn’t give the impression of being deranged. Whereas the eventual Republican nominee very well might, assuming Vance ends up not running for president in 2028—an unlikely but not unthinkable possibility—and some exciting new wild-eyed postliberal demagogue jumps in and steamrolls the competition.

 

I’d like to tell you that Harris vs. Tucker Carlson would be Nixon vs. McGovern 2.0. But given her shortcomings as a politician, Carlson’s sinister charisma, and Americans’ near-total civic bankruptcy, no one would bet much on the Democrat winning that race, let alone winning it easily.

 

In all likelihood, then, there will be no Nixon-McGovern scenario in the next cycle. A better bet is something like the Nixon-Kennedy race of 1960, with Ossoff, perhaps, in the JFK role. If J.D. Vance wants to gratify his “Tricky Dick” aspirations, he’ll need to content himself with his administration carrying out many more Watergate-tier scandals in 18 months than Nixon managed in a lifetime.