Vote McGovern

“Vote McGovern” is the slogan on a 1972 campaign poster Andy Warhol created for George McGovern. The phrase joined a direct electoral appeal to Warhol’s Pop imagery: the poster showed Richard M. Nixon with a green face. In the diary account, that compact political statement also becomes the reason Warhol believed federal auditors had kept scrutinizing his business.

The Poster and Its Political Image

The campaign poster combined the imperative to vote for McGovern with an altered portrait of Nixon. Its wording was brief and explicit, while the green-faced image made the political target visually unmistakable. The entry identifies the poster as Warhol’s work for McGovern’s 1972 campaign and records the slogan as “Vote McGovern.”

Warhol’s Politics and Practice

The slogan’s force sits beside a contradiction in Warhol’s own account of political participation. He was philosophically a liberal Democrat, but said he never voted because he did not want to be called for jury duty. He nevertheless urged political participation among his employees, offering them Election Days off if they promised to vote Democratic. The poster’s public endorsement and his private refusal to cast a ballot thus belong to the same portrait: political allegiance was evident, even when personal participation stopped short of voting.

The Slogan and the IRS Scrutiny

Warhol connected the poster to the ongoing scrutiny of his business. After the IRS began its first major audit of him in 1972, it continued examining his business every year until his death. He believed the audits had been prompted by someone in the Nixon administration because he had made the McGovern poster featuring Nixon. The diary presents this as Warhol’s conviction, not as an established explanation for the audits; the phrase matters both as campaign language and as the political act to which he attributed a lasting consequence.