who ran as a third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election
United States presidential election, 1968 Richard Nixon ran on a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the nation's cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. A year later, he would popularize the term "silent majority" to describe those he viewed as being his target voters. Nixon won the popular vote by a narrow margin of 0.7 percentage points, but won easily in the Electoral College, 301â€“191. The election also featured a strong third party effort by former Alabama Governor George Wallace, a vocal advocate for racial segregation in public schools. He carried five states in the Deep South and ran well in some ethnic enclave industrial districts in the North.
United States presidential primary An incumbent President seeking re-election usually faces no opposition during their respective party's primaries, especially if they are still popular. For Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for example, their respective paths to nomination became uneventful and the races become merely pro forma; all four then went on to win a second presidential term. Serious challenges are rare, but then generally presage failure to win the general election in the fall. During the 1976 Republican Party primaries, then-former California Governor Reagan carried 23 states while running against incumbent President Gerald Ford; Ford then went on to lose the Presidential election to Jimmy Carter. Senator Ted Kennedy then carried 12 states while running against Carter during the 1980 Democratic Party primaries; Reagan then defeated Carter in the fall. Pat Buchanan captured a decent percentage of a protest vote against George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Republican primaries, but only received a handful of delegates; Bush too subsequently went on to lose in the general election to Clinton.