Vintage 1968 Nixon Is a Good Loser Sticker 🗳️ Tricky Dick Republican NOS Collectible

Was Nixon a Good Loser? "NIXON is a GOOD LOSER": The 1968 Joke About a Man Who Kept Losing, Right Before He Won

Size: 3 1/4"

By 1968 the easiest laugh in American politics was that Richard Nixon lost. He had lost the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960 by about 112,000 votes out of 68 million cast. He had lost the race for Governor of California to Pat Brown in 1962, and then told a room full of reporters they would not have Nixon to kick around any more. This round sticker packs that whole reputation into five words, printed in tall red letters above his portrait. Nine months after he announced his run, he was President-elect.

The Sticker Itself

A round sticker approximately 3 1/4" in diameter. The cream face carries NIXON in big red capitals with "is a GOOD LOSER" beneath, and a color portrait of Nixon in a dark suit and tie set inside a circle at the bottom, framed on each side by an arc of four blue stars. Red, white and blue, the palette every campaign item of the day used. The back is plain brown with no printing. This is unused new old stock that was never stuck to anything.

The same slogan also turns up on 1 3/4" pinback buttons dated to 1968; the sticker is the bigger, bolder format.

Who Put Out the Joke?

The sticker does not say who printed it. The Busy Beaver Button Museum, which catalogs the 1968 pinback version, describes it as mocking Nixon's losing campaigns for president and California governor. Dealers who have handled unused stock of the button describe it instead as opposition material, printed to lampoon a two-time loser the moment he declared. Either way the line lands, and that double edge is why it still sells: a Republican could wear it as a wink and a Democrat as a dig.

The Good Loser of 1960

The 1960 race was one of the closest in American history. Republicans pushed recounts in eleven states and charged fraud in Illinois and Texas, but Nixon never filed a formal challenge; he told journalist Earl Mazo that the country could not afford "the agony of a constitutional crisis." On January 6, 1961, as Vice President and presiding officer of the Senate, he stood before the joint session of Congress while the electoral votes were counted and announced his own defeat, calling it a striking example of "the stability of our Constitutional system." When Hawaii sent two competing slates of electors, it was Nixon who asked for unanimous consent to count the Democratic slate, the one pledged to Kennedy.

That is the legend of Nixon the gracious loser, and it gets retold in every contested election since. Historian David Greenberg later argued the picture was more complicated, pointing out that Republican National Committee chairman Thruston Morton ran those recount drives while Nixon stayed publicly above them.

The Sore Loser of 1962

Two years later Nixon came home to run for Governor of California and lost to the Democratic incumbent, Pat Brown. On November 7, 1962, before about 100 reporters at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, he blamed the press for his defeat and signed off with the line that followed him for the rest of his life: "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Brown predicted he would regret those remarks all his life. Five days later ABC aired Howard K. Smith's program "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon," with Alger Hiss, the man Nixon had pursued in the most famous case of his congressional career, among the guests. The network drew some 80,000 angry letters, most of them over Hiss. The obituary turned out to be premature.

So the sticker's joke cuts twice. "Good loser" salutes the man who read out Kennedy's victory to Congress in 1960, and needles the man who lashed out at the California press corps in 1962.

Where "Tricky Dick" Came From

The nickname in this listing's title is older than both defeats. In the bitter 1950 United States Senate race in California, Nixon ran against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. His campaign printed a flyer on pink paper, the "pink sheet," lining her voting record up against that of New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio. Manchester Boddy, the editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News who had run against Douglas in the Democratic primary, branded her "the pink lady" in his pages, and it was in a large advertisement in that same paper that Nixon was called "Tricky Dick." Nixon won the seat 59 percent to 41, and the name stayed with him for the next twenty-four years.

The Comeback That Ended the Joke

Nixon spent the middle of the decade on the road for other Republicans, campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and for dozens of candidates in the 1966 midterms, and banking the goodwill. He announced for President on February 1, 1968, in New Hampshire. Observers wrote about a relaxed "New Nixon," no longer the drawn, tired figure of the 1960 debates or the angry politician of 1962, and his campaign's own slogan was "Nixon's the One!" On November 5, 1968, he beat Hubert Humphrey by less than a percentage point of the popular vote, 43.4 percent to 42.7, with George Wallace taking 13.5, and carried 301 electoral votes. The two-time loser became the 37th President of the United States.

What Came After

Nixon was re-elected in 1972, carrying 49 states. Less than two years later, on August 9, 1974, the Watergate scandal made him the only President ever to resign. His 1960 concession became the example historians and reporters return to whenever the peaceful transfer of power is tested, and his 1962 press conference became shorthand for a political career declared dead too soon. This sticker comes from the season between those two stories, when "loser" was still the punchline.

Displaying It

At 3 1/4" it sits comfortably in a shadow box with 1968 campaign buttons; pair it with a "Nixon's the One!" pin and a Humphrey-Muskie button for a both-sides frame. Old sticker gum often dries out with age, so most collectors keep one like this as a display piece rather than sticking it down, and archival photo corners hold it without any adhesive.

🗳️ About these

The supply is finite - nobody's printing Good Loser stickers again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.