What Was The Greatest Presidential Campaign Of All Time?

Part two of the winning presidential campaign tier list, now looking at the good ones.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

This article is a continuation of part one of the winning presidential campaign tier list, which covered the least impressive winning campaigns in modern history. To provide context for new readers, our bottom-five rounded out as such:

F Tier

Carter 1976

Trump 2024

Biden 2020

D Tier

Clinton 1996

Bush 2004

To see the full list and the explanations for each pick, look here:

The Official Winning Presidential Campaigns Tier List

This list will follow up from the last one by beginning in C Tier and continuing from there to S Tier, where the greatest presidential campaign of all time will be revealed.

C Tier

Richard Nixon 1968

Among the 60 presidential elections held over the course of American history, there are a select few that stand out as more important than the rest. 1968 easily qualifies as one of these races, and just a quick look at the history of presidential elections before and after it can show you why. In the 40 years prior to 1968, Democrats won all presidential elections but two, only ever losing to a moderate war hero. But in the forty years after 1968, Republicans won every single presidential election but three, only ever losing to centrist southerners. Because of this alone, there is no denying that Richard Nixon’s victory in his second campaign profoundly influenced the long-term trajectory of this country in a way that few single victories have ever done.

So why, then, do I have Nixon 1968 squarely in the mediocre middle? It’s very simple: he didn’t actually win his race by all that much, and he probably should have won by a lot more. Even while he succeeded in rehabilitating his image and coming up with some landmark innovations in racism, his actual campaign was error-ridden and cautious to a fault. His first major decision—picking Agnew—was a completely unhelpful choice that outright detracted from the portrait he was trying to paint of himself. When he found himself with a major lead following a chaotic Democratic convention, he proved incapable of taking full control of the narrative, instead choosing to sit behind and give Democrats enough room to start making a comeback. Given time, Hubert Humphrey was able to do exactly that. After finally breaking from his unpopular boss, he managed to gain the momentum and turn the race into a dead heat by the end, ultimately forcing Nixon to commit treason to secure a race that he should never have had to sweat over.

Does this mean that Nixon, a man considered a canny operator even by his most virulent opponents, is actually a fraud? Not necessarily. As we’ll get to far later in this list, he would more than find his stride in his final campaign, when he took control over the election in a way few candidates ever have before or since. He just wasn’t quite there in 1968, rendering it a flawed, if innovative, prototype.

Trump 2016

Credit: Gage Skidmore