1972 United States presidential election in Florida

← 1968 November 7, 1972 1976 →
Turnout	72%
Nominee Richard Nixon George McGovern Party Republican Democratic Home state California South Dakota Running mate Spiro Agnew Sargent Shriver Electoral vote 17 0 Popular vote 1,857,759 718,117 Percentage 71.91% 27.80%
County Results Congressional District Results Nixon   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%   80–90%   90–100%
President before election Richard Nixon Republican Elected President Richard Nixon Republican

The1972 United States presidential election in Florida was held on November 7, 1972, as part ofthe concurrent United States presidential election. Florida voters chose seventeen electors, or representatives tothe Electoral College, who voted forpresident andvice president. Incumbent Republican PresidentRichard Nixon won the state over the Democratic nominee, South Dakota SenatorGeorge McGovern, by a landslide margin of 44.11% and over one million votes.

After having been among the strongest parts of the Democratic "Solid South" between1892 and1944 – except when vehement anti-Catholicism in thePanhandle and urban Republican support gave the state's electoral votes toHerbert Hoover in1928 – Florida turned into a Republican-leaning state at the presidential level from 1948 due to the growth of a strongly business-oriented society in, and influx of conservative Northern retirees to, newly-developedSouth Florida followingWorld War II.^[1] Aided by this vote, the Republicans carried Florida in all three presidential elections from1952 to1960,^[2] thoughNorth Florida remained Democratic-leaning.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s saw a dramatic change in the next two elections. The classicallyDeep Southern north of the state, affected by turmoil over school and university desegregation,^[3] went powerfully to the staunchly conservative RepublicanBarry Goldwater in1964 and then to the segregationist third-party candidacy ofGeorge Wallace in1968. The southern urban areas that had supported the Republicans between 1948 and 1960, meanwhile, contained huge numbers of former Northern retirees hostile to Goldwater's proposed privatization ofSocial Security, and turned first toLyndon Johnson before Nixon recaptured most of them for the Republicans in 1968.^[4]

The1972 Democratic presidential primary in Florida saw Wallace easily carry the state (including every county but highly urbanizedDade) in a ballot that also featured a referendum on court-orderedbusing, in which more than three-fourths of voters supported a constitutional ban on the practice.^[5][6] McGovern andJohn Lindsay were supporters of busing who accused even their rivalsHubert Humphrey andHenry M. Jackson of being covert racists for their opposition thereto, while Wallace openly campaigned against it.^[6] Wallace, the opponent most feared by Nixon, was paralyzed by an attempted assassination in May, and McGovern won the nomination from powerful support in theMidwestern andPacific states. Once McGovern won the nomination, he offered Florida GovernorReubin Askew the vice-presidential slot, but Askew turned the position down.^[7]

As of 2024, this is the last election in which majority-BlackGadsden County voted for a Republican presidential candidate, and the only election in which a Republican won all of the state's counties.^[8] Among white voters, 78% supported Nixon while 22% supported McGovern.^[9][10]

George Wallace would win a plurality^{[clarification needed]} of the Democratic Primary vote in all of the counties in the state.^[11]

Richard Nixon would end up winning a majority of the vote in all counties except for Desoto County.^[13]

Nixon won all 15 congressional districts, including 11 held by Democrats.^[15]

Incumbent PresidentNixon overwhelmingly won the state of Florida with 71.91% of the vote, carrying all of Florida's 67 counties (the last time any presidential candidate has won every single county in the state) and seventeen electoral votes.^[16] This made Florida about 21% more Republican than the nation-at-large, the farthest to the right of the nation it has ever voted. Nixon's victory in Florida made it his fifth strongest state afterMississippi,Georgia,Oklahoma andAlabama.^[17] McGovern reached 40% of the vote only in Dade County with its substantial Jewish and Latin populations, plusAlachua County with its large population of liberal college students who were a major base for his candidacy^[18] – and the Democratic candidate only reached thirty percent of the vote in four other counties. Nixon's message enabled him to capture virtually all of the Wallace vote from 1968, as shown by the fact that pineywoodsHolmes County, which had been Wallace's fifth-strongest county in 1968,^[19] was to be Nixon's fourth-best county in 1972 with over 92% of the vote.^[20]

In addition to hostility towards busing and the "acid, amnesty and abortion" policies which Nixon consistently accused McGovern of^[18] despite eventual running mate Sargent Shriver being firmly opposed to abortion, the Democratic campaign in Florida was also crippled by McGovern's policy of normalizing relationships withFidel Castro's Cuba. Relationships with Cuba were a hotbed issue in the most liberal and leastSouthern region of the state around Miami,^[21] and drove even many voters who had supported Humphrey in 1968 to Nixon and the Republican Party.^[22] This allowed the GOP to carryMonroe County, which had consistently voted Democratic since 1888.^[23]

• Black, Earl;Black, Merle (1992).The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected.Harvard University Press.ISBN 0674941306.

• 1972 Florida elections
• United States presidential elections in Florida
• 1972 United States presidential election by state

• Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use American English from June 2025
• All Wikipedia articles written in American English
• Use mdy dates from September 2023
• Elections using electoral votes
• Wikipedia articles needing clarification from February 2023