Among the candidates he defeated were early front-runner Edmund Muskie, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey, governor George Wallace, and representative Shirley Chisholm.

Nixon emphasized the strong economy and his success in foreign affairs, while McGovern ran on a platform calling for an immediate end to the Vietnam War and the institution of a guaranteed minimum income.

Republican candidates: Nixon was a popular incumbent president in 1972, as he was credited with opening the People's Republic of China as a result of his visit that year, and achieving détente with the Soviet Union.

McCloskey ran as an anti-war candidate, while Ashbrook opposed Nixon's détente policies towards China and the Soviet Union.

Vice President Spiro Agnew was re-nominated by acclamation; while both the party's moderate wing and Nixon himself had wanted to replace him with a new running-mate (the moderates favoring Nelson Rockefeller, and Nixon favoring John Connally), it was ultimately concluded that such action would incur too great a risk of losing Agnew's base of conservative supporters.

[27] Subsequently, the paper published an attack on the character of Muskie's wife Jane, reporting that she drank and used off-color language during the campaign.

[27][28] Nearly two years before the election, South Dakota Senator George McGovern entered the race as an anti-war, progressive candidate.

Two days later, journalist Robert Novak quoted a "Democratic senator", later revealed to be Thomas Eagleton, as saying: "The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot.

[31][32] Alabama Governor George Wallace, an infamous segregationist who ran on a third-party ticket in 1968, did well in the Southern United States (winning nearly every county in the Florida primary) and among alienated and dissatisfied voters in the North.

The day after the assassination attempt, Wallace won the Michigan and Maryland primaries, but the shooting effectively ended his campaign, and he pulled out in July.

[50] A grassroots attempt to displace Eagleton in favor of Texas state representative Frances Farenthold gained significant traction, though was ultimately unable to change the outcome of the vote.

McGovern later approached six prominent Democrats to run for vice president: Ted Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, Abraham Ribicoff, Larry O'Brien, and Reubin Askew.

Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy, former Ambassador to France, and former Director of the Peace Corps, later accepted.

[61] Schmitz was endorsed by fellow John Birch Society member Walter Brennan, who also served as finance chairman for his campaign.

[62] John Hospers and Theodora "Tonie" Nathan of the newly formed Libertarian Party were on the ballot only in Colorado and Washington, but were official write-in candidates in four others, and received 3,674 votes, winning no states.

The Libertarian vice-presidential nominee Tonie Nathan became the first Jew and the first woman in U.S. history to receive an Electoral College vote.

Benjamin Spock and Julius Hobson were nominated for president and vice-president, respectively, by the People's Party.The following graph depicts the standing of each candidate in the poll aggregators from February 1972 to Election Day.

McGovern ran on a platform of immediately ending the Vietnam War and instituting a guaranteed minimum income for the nation's poor.

His campaign was harmed by his views during the primaries, which alienated many powerful Democrats, the perception that his foreign policy was too extreme, and the Eagleton debacle.

With an enormous fundraising advantage and a comfortable lead in the polls, Nixon concentrated on large rallies and focused speeches to closed and select audiences, leaving much of the retail campaigning to surrogates like Vice President Agnew.

Nixon did not try by design to extend his coattails to Republican congressional or gubernatorial candidates, preferring to pad his own margin of victory.

[92] The 1972 election was also the most recent time several highly populous urban counties, including Cook in Illinois, Orleans in Louisiana, Hennepin in Minnesota, Cuyahoga in Ohio, Durham in North Carolina, Queens in New York, and Prince George's in Maryland, have voted Republican.

The pro-Wallace group of voters had only given AIP nominee John Schmitz a depressing 2.4% of its support, while 19.1% backed McGovern, and the majority 78.5% broke for Nixon.

As of 2024, Nixon was the seventh of eight presidential nominees to win a significant number of electoral votes in at least three elections, the others being Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Trump.

[106] On June 17, 1972, five months before election day, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel in Washington, D. C.; the resulting investigation led to the revelation of attempted cover-ups of the break-in within the Nixon administration.

What became known as the Watergate scandal eroded President Nixon's public and political support in his second term, and he resigned on August 9, 1974, in the face of probable impeachment by the House of Representatives and removal from office by the Senate.