Nixon’s trick that Trump missed

United States President Donald Trump is not the first election loser to charge that his defeatwas due to fraud.

But other losing candidates have handled defeat much more skilfully than Trump has – and gone on to further political success. If Trump is serious about running for president again, he should study how another defeated Republican, Richard Nixon, responded to losing an election he thought was stolen.

The election of 1960, pitting Nixon against John F Kennedy, was the closest contest of the 20th century. Nixon won 49.6 per cent of the popular vote. The Democrat edged him out with 49.7 per cent. In his definitive history, The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White wrote: ‘‘If only 4500 voters in Illinois and 28,000 voters in Texas changed their minds ... those 32,500 votes would havemade Richard Nixon President of the United States.’’

As soon as the results were announced, Republicans began to issue charges of fraud and ballot-box stuffing. They focused on Texas, where Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon Johnson, had a history of electoral chicanery, and Cook County, where Chicagomayor Richard Daley’s political machine routinely manipulated the vote in Democrats’ favour.

Although Illinois had gone Republican in recent presidential elections, Kennedy carried the state and its crucial 27 electoral votes in 1960 by one 10th of 1 per cent. The victory was propelled by a huge Democratic margin in Cook County, where many precincts waited to report their vote totals until after the heavily Republican counties downstate had issued final tallies.

Unlike Trump, the Republicans in 1960 presented solid evidence that the reported count was wrong. A special prosecutor brought criminal fraud charges against hundreds of Democratic election workers in Cook County and estimated that the Democrats had stolen about 10,000 votes there, more than Kennedy’s statewide margin. In Texas, Republicans cited precincts where the Kennedy-johnson vote total was 25 per cent higher than the number of registered voters.

National Republican leaders strongly urged Nixon to fight the results in both states. The vicepresident recalled later that he was sorely tempted.

‘‘There was no question that there was real substance to many of these [fraud] charges,’’ Nixon wrote in his memoir, Six Crises, published in 1962.

In private, Nixon fumed, telling friends at a Christmas party that year: ‘‘We won, but they stole it from us.’’

Yet unlike the current president, in public Nixon quickly accepted the reported result. In Six Crises, Nixon explained his decision not to fight: ‘‘The bitterness that would be engendered by such amanoeuvre on my part would ... have done incalculable and lasting damage throughout the country ... I could think of no worse example for nations abroad ... than that of the US wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.’’

But Nixon also had personal considerations for his decision. If he had waged a legal battle against the reported results, Nixon wrote, ‘‘Charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.’’

In retrospect, that seems to have been awise choice. Eight years later, Nixon won his party’s primary again and went on to an easy victory in the general election.

In contrast, Trump’s continuing battle against this year’s election results seems to be creating precisely the bitterness and the bad global example that Nixon worried about in November 1960. Unless he changes course and follows the Nixon precedent, Trump probably will take on a label of ‘‘sore loser’’ that will follow him, asnixon warned, and remove any possibility of a further political career.

TR Reid was awashington Post reporter and columnist.

‘‘We won, but they stole it from us.’’

Richard Nixon