Jul 25, 2018 2 min read

In nearly all respects up to now, prior to the two national conventions, this has to be the strangest and wildest of all Presidential election years.

In any other Presidential year, the obvious advantages enjoyed by Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey and Republican Richard M. Nixon would have long since discouraged real opposition.

Instead, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and prior to his death, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, mount real challenges to Humphrey, and on the Republican side, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Governor Ronald Reagan do the same to Nixon.

And, playing upon the fears of the nation, former Alabama Governor George Wallace is a strong third-party threat.

It is a strange yet wonderful election year that each day brings new surprises, new stories, new angles.

In just a single day this week:

Hubert Humphrey denied any possibility of any deal with Governor Wallace should the election be thrown into the House of Representatives.

Humphrey said that whether he would invited Senator Edward Kennedy to be his running mate depends upon Senator Kennedy’s wishes.

Ronald Reagan set up headquarters at the Governor’s Conference in Cincinnati that looked like a candidate’s headquarters while steadfastly denying he is a candidate as he has done all along while making campaign speeches across the country.

A story was published that Milton Shapp, the prominent Philadelphia Democrat who mustered the aid of Vice President Humphrey in his unsuccessful bid for the Governorship of Pennsylvania in 1966, now is considering endorsing Humphrey’s opponent, Senator McCarthy.

Senator Clark, who narrowly missed being upset in the Democratic Primary for nomination for the Senate by Congressman John Dent, appears at a fund-raising dinner for Dent to pay off the debts incurred when Dent was trying to beat Clark. Dent, meanwhile, has enrolled as a co-chairman of the Clark campaign.

It is a strange and wonderful campaign already and there are still the conventions and Fall campaign to come.