I turned 21 in 1968. It was my first chance to participate in an election and it was with roughly equal parts hope and despair. I attended a Eugene McCarthy speech and was a little dismayed to see him arrive in a charted 727. I guess I expected him to be piloting his own Piper or driving a Beetle or something. Then there was the Democratic Convention which I watched in horror on a small TV in a friend's small apartment. Neither McCarthy nor McGovern won the nomination. It went to Humphrey and led to the observation that "if Nixon had run unopposed, he would have lost". I wrote in McCarthy that year. In 1972, McGovern got the nomination and my vote. He also got my vote in 1976 but it was another write-in. Those votes may have been naive and they were certainly ineffective but I still like them.