New Orleans       My aunt Leah would never let me forget Election Day in 1968, and would half-kid and half-scold me for decades.  It had nothing to do with the contest, which was still being counted out between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey that night when I showed up at their house in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I was driving a Ford Econoline van, rigged for camping, and their house was the first stop as I headed for California.  It wasn’t that she and my uncle weren’t glad to see me.  I had stayed with them during the summer of 1966 after graduating from high school, when I was working as a contract roustabout in the Skelly oil fields in Velma, Oklahoma, where they were then.  No, it was the fact that I had picked up a hitchhiker on the highway that night, and came in with him in tow as well.  Aunt Leah was too lovely and mannered to refuse a guest, but forevermore she would insinuate that I had risked her children’s lives by bringing in an unknown stranger that night.

Richard Nixon was a strange, but too well known commodity on that night.  Nixon was the Trump of that day, though different, equally feared, even though many of us who had marched on the street demanding Lyndon Johnson step down over the tragedy and travesty of the Vietnam War.  On that November 5^th, Nixon won by less than one-million votes over Humphrey out of more than 70 million cast.

1968 Election Results

		Candidate	Party	Electoral Votes	Popular Votes
✓		Richard M. Nixon	Republican	301	31,710,470
		Hubert H. Humphrey	Democratic	191	30,898,055
		George C. Wallace	American Independent	46	9,906,473

You might wonder how I voted in that election, but I have to remind you that I couldn’t vote in 1968.  I was hardly 20 years old then, and the voting age was 21.  The 26^th Amendment lowering the age to 18 was proposed in Congress in March 1971 and ratified by a sufficient number of states by July 1, 1971.  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration that my generation paid for the lowering of the voting age in America with blood.  The contradiction between a draft for all 18-year-olds to go to war and die for the country made no sense without letting them vote as well, even if that didn’t happen at the presidential level until 1972, when Nixon obliterated George McGovern.

Nonetheless, I have to wonder how US history might have worked out differently, if people my age in the 60s generation would have been able to vote in 1968?  There were many millions of boomers infused with the youth culture and rebellion of that time.  Our votes wouldn’t have gone to Wallace or Nixon, that’s for sure.

All of which makes me scratch my head when pollsters and pundits write off young voters now in the 2024 election.  We would have changed history.  Young people could also make history now, but you have to actually go to the polling station and do it right.  Don’t ever miss a chance to vote!