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Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern signaled a political realignment whose consequences are still being felt 50 years later

Presidential reputations have little to do with electoral performance. Abraham Lincoln, our most beloved president, did not even win 40% of the popular vote when he ran in 1860. Richard Nixon, arguably our least beloved, won an overwhelming victory on Nov. 7, 1972—50 years ago this week.

When the results were in, Nixon had defeated South Dakota Senator George McGovern by nearly 20 million votes and by an even wider margin in the electoral college (520-17). It seemed like a historic realignment, one that would position Republicans for decades of success.

Watergate interrupted those plans, of course. But the realignment was real, and Nixon’s strategies still affect Americans as they head to the polls, a half-century later. Halloween has come and gone, but in many ways, we still live with the ghosts of 1972.

Nixon hoped to carve out votes from Democrats who felt alienated by the radical currents coursing through their party.

Four years earlier, Nixon had prevailed in a three-man race, but with only 43% of the vote. To improve his chances of reelection, he hoped to carve out votes from Southerners, independents and centrist Democrats who felt alienated by the radical currents coursing through their party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Conveniently, the Democrats were doing little to stifle those currents. After the disaster of the 1968 convention in Chicago, when Mayor Daley’s police clubbed protesters on live TV, they created a commission to rewrite the rules of the nomination process. Old-school power brokers—mayors, union bosses and state chairmen—were weakened, in favor of a more open process that, in theory, would appeal more directly to the people, through primaries.

As the commission’s co-chair, George McGovern was in a strong position to benefit from the new rules. A former fighter pilot in World War II, he had become dovish on Vietnam and many other issues, including amnesty for draft evaders. Republicans attacked, saying that his campaign was about “acid, amnesty and abortion.” Blue-collar Democrats had already begun to migrate toward Nixon in 1968, and that trickle would turn into a flood in 1972, especially after George Wallace’s challenge ended with an assassination attempt that left him paralyzed.

The Democrats continued to implode over the summer. The party was striving to reinvent itself, and the candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for the presidency, was heroic in its way. But Democrats continued to flounder as they tried to please every constituency. The party platform articulated “the right to be different,” and the convention certainly was. On the night of McGovern’s nomination he had to wait for hours, listening to satirical speeches from the floor proposing, among other things, Mao Zedong and Archie Bunker as running mates. Finally, at 2:48 a.m., he gave his speech to the nation. Inside the White House, gleeful Nixon staffers joked that McGovern had finally reached a prime time audience—in Guam.

McGovern also ran into trouble with his search for a running mate. He was rejected by a long list of party grandees until he finally found a Missouri senator, Thomas Eagleton, who said yes. But when news broke that Eagleton had suffered from depression and undergone electroshock therapy, McGovern asked him to resign and gave the spot to Sargent Shriver, a former Peace Corps director. These unforced errors continued to dog the Democrats into the fall.

At the same time, many voters liked Nixon’s record. The Vietnam War was far from over, but U.S. casualties were declining, and the economy was humming. GDP grew 6.5% in 1972, and in November the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 1000-point threshold for the first time. If not exactly an environmentalist (he vetoed the Clean Water Act), Nixon understood that public opinion had shifted and Americans wanted to live in a cleaner country. He launched the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, celebrated Earth Day and even tried to rally Americans behind “Earth Week.” Amazing as it may seem today for a Republican, Nixon also supported the expansion of health insurance, Social Security and anti-hunger programs, as well as ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. He even contemplated a ban on handguns.

McGovern had his moments. Is there a better campaign song than “We Need to Be Governed by McGovern”? He also had a catchy, MAGA-ish slogan, “Make America Happen Again.” But the Democratic campaign was mostly a shambles. Prominent Democrats either openly or privately pledged support to Nixon, including Lyndon Johnson, labor leader George Meany, a passel of senators and many law-enforcement officials. Publicly, Nixon ran a smart campaign, seeming to stay above the fray.

The overwhelming victory came as no surprise in November. But Nixon later wrote, “I am at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over me that night,” as if he had a premonition of the days ahead. Already, the public knew of the break-in at the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate on June 17, and despite frantic efforts to contain the crisis, Nixon would never get the genie back into the bottle.

The tragedy is that he felt a need to game the system when it was so clear that he would win. Nixon could be gracious, as he was in 1960, when he narrowly lost to Kennedy. But there was a darker side, as his White House tapes famously revealed, showing his contempt for the rules. An aide, Jeb Magruder, later recalled that Nixon had a “voracious appetite for getting the enemy.” He used the word over and over again: “Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy…write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

In fact, 783 newspapers endorsed Nixon in 1972, compared to only 56 for McGovern. True, there were Nixon-haters in the media, and some turned it into a kind of entertainment. Hunter S. Thompson was positively Gothic: “He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close.”

But Nixon’s hatred of the chattering classes warped his judgment. Watergate was far worse than an intelligence-gathering operation; it was an attack on the integrity of our elections. Nixon’s underlings disrupted Democratic rallies and threatened to maim or murder journalists they disliked. They falsified classified documents to suggest misdeeds by the Kennedy administration. As the scandal deepened, Nixon tried to deploy the Justice Department against his rivals. Long after it was over, the former president tried to claim that Abraham Lincoln would have done the same thing, because anything a president does is, by definition, legal. That is the precise opposite of what Lincoln believed.

If this sounds familiar, it is because Donald Trump borrowed so much from the Nixon playbook. In 1972, Mr. Trump was just beginning to work for his father’s real estate empire, but as biographer Maggie Haberman has observed, he retains a “huge fascination” with the 37th president. Perhaps the ultimate legacy of the 1972 election is that it revealed just how fragile this great democracy could be, once the guardrails came off.

—Mr. Widmer is Distinguished Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. His latest book is “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.”