Our Alex Sayf Cummings has a new piece up at Salon looking at the epic 1972 electoral battle between Rep. Nick Galifianakis and TV commentator Jesse Helms, in which a liberal antiwar Democrat lost narrowly to his archconservative opponent amid the historic Nixon landslide. The story is particularly relevant today; Galifianakis’s nephew Zach is starring in a new film, The Campaign, in which his character runs for national office from North Carolina, and the Helms-Galifianakis race embodies many of the cutthroat, bigoted tactics that defined both Helms’s subsequent career and much of the poisonous politics of today’s Tea Party era.
Tropics on the 1972 Galifianakis v. Helms Race
