Interesting question arises today: Suppose George McGovern had won the '72 election. Would we know much of anything about the Watergate scandal today? The "third-rate burglary" passed in and out the public eye rather quickly over the summer of that year, and about all we knew by Election Day were (1) that some cash intended for the Nixon re-election campaign had been laundered through a slush find into the bank account of one of the burglars, and (2) that the FBI had established that the break-in was one component of a dirty tricks campaign being waged by the Nixon camp. But that's all anybody knew.
So the question becomes: with Nixon on his way out of town and a new President about to be sworn in, does the Post keep a pair of city beat reporters on a story that has lost a great deal of its timeliness? Look at it how it might have been argued at the time: Whatever the outline of the dirty-tricks campaign might have been, it certainly wasn't effective, because the conspirators got caught and their candidate lost. Much ado about nothing, in other words. Wouldn't the paper's resources be put to better use running down stories about the incoming President and his transition team, features on his wife and family, recaps of the just-completed presidential campaign, and details of the District's inauguration prep?
Keep in mind, too, that the link between the burglars and the White House wasn't established on the record until FBI directorate nominee Patrick Gray testified to it in February '73: Specifically, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If George McGovern had won the White House, that testimony would've likely never been heard because someone else almost certainly would've been nominated for the job.
My guess is, with a new administration about to be sworn in, Watergate would have been quickly pronounced Yesterday's News, and we wouldn't have heard much more of it beyond some cursory notice in the Post's back pages of the the burglars' trial and sentencing. The rest of the story would have likely been lost in the backward rush of history's rear view. In that sense, Nixon's landslide could be said to have paved the way for his downfall because it ensured that a number of the scandal's key players---John Mitchell in particular, who ran the re-election campaign---would maintain a high public profile for the next four years instead of fading into electoral obscurity, out of sight and out of mind. That's my hunch, but it's an interesting scenario to ponder either way.
---Baron V
Comments