Nominating a Republican Who Can Get 50 Percent

It’s doable, but, alas, not with Donald Trump.

The election of November 2022 was the 50th anniversary of something that went unnoticed and unremarked upon by Republicans and Democrats alike. It marked 50 years since the November 1972 election, in which Richard Nixon, a Republican who in 1968 won the presidency with only 43.4 percent of the vote (edging Hubert Humphrey out by 0.7 percent), soared to a landslide reelection.
In 1972, Richard Milhous Nixon won 49 of 50 states (losing only Massachusetts) and the Electoral College 520 to 17. He trounced George McGovern by 18 million votes. Nixon got nearly 61 percent of the popular vote.
Yes, think about that.
Donald Trump boosters often tell me that no Republican presidential nominee could today get 50 percent of the vote. Really? Why not? George W. Bush did it in 2004. His father did it in 1988. Ronald Reagan did it twice.
In 1980, Reagan defeated the incumbent Jimmy Carter 51 percent to 41 percent. In a stunning rebuke, the sitting president was crushed in the Electoral College, 489 to 49.
In 1984, Reagan, like Nixon in 1972, won almost 60 percent (he got 59 percent), but, even more impressively, he took 49 of 50 states and the Electoral College 525 to 13. He lost only Minnesota, his challenger Walter Mondale’s home state. He beat Mondale by almost 17 million votes. Reagan twice won New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and even Massachusetts. (He twice lost Minnesota, a state whose liberalism I’ve never figured out.)
Republican candidates for president have gotten over 50 percent of the vote more often than recent Democrat nominees have. Until Joe Biden in 2020, the only Democrat presidential nominee to get over 50 percent of the vote since LBJ in 1964 was Barack Obama. (All right, all right, Carter got 50.08 percent in 1976. I guess I have to include him, too.)
Here's an even more striking figure: From 1920 to 2020, there have been 26 presidential elections. The winner got over 50 percent of the vote in 19 of them, i.e., the vast majority. In three othe...