Is there anywhere where McGovern did better than Humphrey?

[darklordoftech]

I know McGovern did better than Carter in San Francisco, but is there anywhere where McGovern did better than Humphrey?

[Podgy the Bear]

--Washtenaw County, Michigan (Ann Arbor--home of UMich).  In fact, relative to the big states of the 1970s, McGovern did reasonably well in Michigan.
--Several counties in South Dakota

[morgankingsley]

--Several counties in South Dakota

I don't know why I did not think of that

[Calthrina950]

--Washtenaw County, Michigan (Ann Arbor--home of UMich).  In fact, relative to the big states of the 1970s, McGovern did reasonably well in Michigan.
--Several counties in South Dakota

Michigan is one of the few states where McGovern outperformed Mondale (Massachusetts, his only win, and his home state of South Dakota are two others that I think of where this is true). He got 42% there, as compared to Mondale's 40%. Michigan was more Democratic than the national average in 1972, but more Republican than the national average in 1984.

[mianfei]

By my calculation on a spreadsheet, there were something like 794 counties where McGovern’s vote percentage exceeded Humphrey’s. These included:

• majority black or majority Native American counties where first-time minority voting gave McGovern extra support (e.g. Apache County, Arizona or Bullock, Lowndes and Wilcox Counties in Alabama)
• some other rural counties in the South (e.g. Houston, Perry and Stewart Counties, Tennessee, Jackson County, Alabama). These suffered reduced turnout due to absence of Wallace.
• counties in the East River region of South Dakota due to a powerful “favorite son” vote (appalling as was the number of counties McGovern won without this “favorite son” effect, it would have been less than one hundred). Consider that McGovern won his home county, Davison, by 15 percentage points, yet it has not voted for any other losing Democrat, and that two other South Dakota counties (Hutchinson and Turner) that have voted Democratic only for FDR in 1932 both voted more Democratic than the nation in 1972.
• College-town counties like Washtenaw, Michigan, Athens, Ohio and Jackson, Illinois, who responded strongly to McGovern’s anti-war sentiment