movement had dynamited the New Deal coalition, and because his undercover campaign of dirty tricks worked quite well at dividing the Democrats. (People sometimes forget that the Watergate scandal was touched off by a botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters to replace some malfunctioning wiretaps.) It is virtually beyond question that any Democrat who went up against Nixon would have lost.

For another, the composition of the electorate has changed dramatically over time. An 18-year-old first-time voter in 1972 would be 65 years old today. Back in 1970 about 83 percent of the population was non-Hispanic white; today it is about 60 percent. It is senseless to pretend as though one highly-contingent election is anything more than a hazy demonstration of political bedrock realities, especially almost 50years after the fact.

But more importantly, McGovern was not the last Democratic presidential nominee to lose an election. They also lost in 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016. In almost all of these elections, the candidate was on the party's center or right: Jimmy Carter started the neoliberal deregulation trend with airlines and trucking as president from 1977-1980, Walter Mondale ran on austerity and balancing the budget in 1984 (and incidentally lost almost as badly as McGovern did), Al Gore was a centrist New Democrat who ran alongside the pathological warmonger Joe Lieberman in 2000, John Kerry defeated the more progressive Howard Dean in 2004, and Hillary Clinton of course bested Bernie Sanders in 2016. (To be fair, both Gore and Clinton won the popular vote, and