National Career
In the Senate election in 1958, Muskie won 60 percent of the vote, defeating incumbent Republican Senator Frederick G. Payne, who received 39 percent of the vote. Muskie was reelected in 1964, 1970 and 1976, each time with over 60 percent of the vote. Muskie was one of the first environmentalists to enter the Senate, and was a leading campaigner for new and stronger measures to curb pollution and provide a cleaner environment.
In 1968, Muskie was nominated for Vice President on the Democratic ticket with sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The Humphrey-Muskie campaign lost the election to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Humphrey and Muskie received 42.72 percent of the popular vote and carried 13 states and 191 electoral votes; Nixon and Agnew won 43.42 percent of the popular vote and carried 32 states and 301 electoral votes, while the third party ticket of George Wallace and Curtis LeMay, running as candidates of the American Independent Party, took 13.53 percent of the popular vote and took five states in the Deep South and their 46 votes in the electoral college. Because of Agnew's apparent weakness as a candidate relative to Muskie, Humphrey was heard to remark that voters' uncertainties about whom to choose between the two major presidential candidates should be resolved by their attitudes toward the Vice-Presidential candidates.
Continuing his career in the Senate, Muskie served as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee through the Ninety-third to the Ninety-sixth Congresses in 1973–80.
In 1970, the Maine senator was chosen to articulate the Democratic party's message to congressional voters before the midterm elections. Muskie's national stature was raised as a major candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. In 1973, he gave the Democratic response to Nixon's State of the Union address.
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