Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Gary Hart (D-CO), John Glenn D-OH), Dale Bumpers (D-AR), Richard Stone (D-FL), Mike Gravel (D-AK), were also elected during this cycle, with future Senators Paul Simon (D-IL), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Paul Tsongas (D-MA), Max Baucus (D-MT), Chris Dodd (D-CT), and Bob Krueger (D-TX) winning seats to the House of Representatives in this election.
Of the Democratic Senators elected in 1974, Leahy, Hart, Ford, Bumpers, and Glenn would be re-elected to second terms and Gravel and Stone would lose their primaries in 1980.
If the journalists who helped uncover the scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, could expose the crimes of a president, then certainly there were crooked politicians elsewhere.
However, those changes had, Lawrence argued, helped contribute to the later rise of the New Right and shaped the polarized political climate of the late 2010s.
[11] The Watergate Babies often framed what had previously been policy goals—such as stronger consumer protection and environmental cleanup—as rights, a discursive tactic that Lawrence noted would later be adopted by conservatives.