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THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION:
A VICTORY FOR RACISM

ONCE every four years activists in the Movement have a unique opportunity to measure or get a feel of the political pulse of the population of our country. Presidential elections are in some respects a barometer of the level of social consciousness and the recent elections will be recorded in history as the most significant in a generation.
In these elections seventy-five million people went to the polls, the largest ever. And yet the largest number of people who did not participate, but were eligible, was also in evidence in this election. Only fifty-five percent of the eligible voters cast their vote in this election, the lowest percentage of any industrial country in the world. There has been a consistent growth over the past decade in the percentage of the population eligible by age and residence, who do not participate in elections.
The results of these elections which, as is well known, gave the Nixon-Agnew administration a landslide vote for the second term of office suggest that the white American majority voted its fantasies, prejudices and insecurities and rushed into the arms of Big Daddy who soothed them with such demagogic slogans as "peace is at hand."
In spite of Watergate, the ITT and other scandals, a skillfully conducted political campaign held together the Republican Party constituency, with which Richard Nixon had won the Presidency of 1968, and added to this major defections from the Democratic Party, particularly among Wallace voter in the South who had previously voted a third party ticket. 
This landslide victory by the Nixon-Agnew administration did not produce a further shift to the Right in an already conservative Congress and Senate controlled by the Democratic Party while there were a few genuine bright spots in the total election picture. The election of Reverend Andrew J. Young to Congress from Atlanta as well as Congresswomen Yvonne Braithwaite Burke and Barbara Jordan from Los Angeles and Houston, respectively, will undoubtedly add great strength to the critical work of the Black Congressional Caucus. California voters defeated the proposition designed to wipe out the organizing efforts of the Farmworkers Union.

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