And yet the Gallup poll for March 69 already has those numbers up to 66 willing vs. 24 unwilling.
I suspect that has quite a bit to do with the change in presidential administrations.
South Carolina voters back then were wealthy (and therefore educated), extremely partisan Democrats. I don't think they were unaware of their party's demographics. But, in any event, they were far more anti-Republican than anti-Catholic-candidates.
In 1968 you have the groups of people who would have been
More pro-Republican than anti-black-candidates (these people would be turned off by Romney's dovishness)
More pro-black-candidates than anti-Republican (a description that fits virtually nobody, since New England WASPs were extremely partisan Republicans and blacks were extremely partisan Democrats)
vs.
More anti-black-candidates than pro-Republican (describes a large portion of whites)
More anti-Republican than pro-black-candidates (describes most blacks and another large chunk of whites)
The latter two groups would have dwarfed the first two.
I suspect that people's feelings about race in 1968 were quite a bit stronger than people's feelings about Palin in 2008.
Romney isn't enough of a scumbag to sabotage the peace talks. Humphrey obviously wins.
The South Vietnamese contacted Nixon's campaign, not the other way around. They asked if they could get a better deal in Paris under a Nixon administration than the one they had been negotiating up to that point, and the Nixon camp said yes. (What were they supposed to say? No?) They
did in fact get a better deal with Nixon.
One might compare to
Ted Kennedy, unsolicited, offering to aid Yuri Andropov in sabotaging Reagan's arms control negotiations. Offering to aid an enemy seems rather more treasonous to me than reassuring an ally, but then I'm just some fascist nutcase.