United States presidential election in Texas, 1968

The 1968 United States presidential election in Texas was held on November 5, 1968. The Democratic Party candidate, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey, very narrowly carried Texas with 41.4% of the vote, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes. However he narrowly lost the general election to Republican candidate, former Vice President Richard Nixon. This was the first occasion when Texas had not backed the winning Presidential candidate since voting for John W. Davis in 1924.

When Texas “favorite son” Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election in March, it was generally thought that the Republican Party would have a good chance of winning the Lone Star State despite losing by 27 percentage points in 1964, and the presence of former Alabama Governor George Wallace running as a candidate for the American Independent Party, a far-right political party. Wallace was known for his pro-segregationist politics, which would win him five southern states in the general election. However, in Humphrey’s favor was the abolition of the poll tax via the Twenty-Fourth Amendment that permitted previously disfranchised Mexican-Americans to register and vote for the first time. The Mexican-American South Texas counties of Duval, Webb and Jim Hogg had been among the four most Democratic in the nation in 1964, and despite polling fewer than eighteen thousand out of a state total exceeding three million votes, those three counties would provide over thirty percent of Humphrey’s ultimate winning plurality and Duval was again the most Democratic county in the nation.

On September 21, a poll by Joe Belden gave Nixon and Humphrey each thirty percent of the vote and Wallace twenty-five percent. In the period between Belden’s poll and the election, Wallace lost considerable support largely to Humphrey, owing chiefly to Democrat Preston Smith’s “resolutely law-and-order” campaign for the governorship. This, along with strong loyalty of Texas Democrats much more conservative than the liberal Humphrey, was sufficient to allow the Democrats to to carry the state.

Wallace, who had been rivalling the two major party nominees in early polls, came in a distant third with 18.97% of the vote, his lowest in any former Confederate state. Wallace did win 21 of Texas’ 254 counties, which was enough for him to also carry one congressional district. Wallace’s base of support was primarily in rural East Texas, which is more culturally tied to the Deep South than the rest of the state, although he did carry four counties in the West Texas region, with Loving County being the westernmost county in the country to vote for Wallace.

As of 2017, this is the last occasion the following counties have supported the Democratic candidate: Blanco, Nacogdoches, Rockwall and Scurry. It was the only election between 1924 and 2012 when Val Verde County backed a losing Presidential candidate.