- Edmund Muskie’s campaign had been sabotaged by Nixon re-election operatives.
- The twenty-sixth Amendment had lowered the voting age to 18.
The Democrats had grounds for optimism as well, especially when the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in 1970 Nixon tried to appeal to these new voters by narrowing and then ending the draft, but Democrats hoped twenty-one to eighteen in that an influx of young men and women into the political process would favor a liberal and more idealistic alternative to the president. Young, idealistic voters did, in fact, play a significant role in the campaign, but mostly in helping to pick the Democratic nominee, a development that wound up playing into the incumbent’s hands.
From Nixon's perspective, the more liberal an opponent, the better, since a left-leaning Democratic nominee would enable him to claim the center and sharpen his message about cultural values. Nixon's campaign organization, the Committee to Re-elect the President (officially abbreviated as CRP, but derided by critics with the acronym CREEP), sought to undermine the candidacies of more centrist Democratic hopefuls, especially the presumed frontrunner, Maine senator Edmund Muskie. In the New Hampshire primary, Nixon operatives phoned voters at uncivilized hours, pretending to be Muskie campaign volunteers from Harlem. CRP also forged a letter to a New Hampshire newspaper reporting that a Muskie staffer had used the term Canuck to disparage Americans of French-Canadian descent. When Muskie's margin of victory in New Hampshire fell far short of expectations, many Democrats began looking elsewhere for a candidate. Liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern was well positioned to benefit from Muskie's problems, more democratic nomination rules, and the Iwenty-sixth Amendment. With Wallace drawing conservative votes away from centrist candidates earlier in the campaign, McGovern was able to secure the nomination.