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It is worth noting that Wallace’s own support for segregation might have been entirely opportunistic. He initially ran for Governor of Alabama as a pan-racial populist. After losing, he declared, “I will never be outn*ggered again” and later reflected that, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n*ggers, and they stomped the floor.” Wallace, like Thurmond before him, sought to throw the presidential election to the House.
Wallace was, at the time, Governor of Alabama. He had previously run for President in 1964 as a Democrat (as he did again in 1972), but this time he ran as the standard bearer of the American Independent Party. His unofficial slogan was “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties.” He ran on a law-and-order and pro-segregation platform seeking to, as Thurmond did before him, throw the election to the House.
Wallace was arguably far more successful than Thurmond. First, he got 46 electoral votes to Thurmond’s 39, making him the last third-party candidate to get electoral votes. He also got nearly 10 million votes (9.9 million) compared to Thurmond’s 1.1 million. For Thurmond, this was a scant 2.4 percent of the vote, compared to Wallace’s 13.5 percent. While Wallace ran first in the Confederacy with 45 percent of the vote, he succeeded where Thurmond did not, for making a direct appeal to Northern working-class voters. Fully one in three AFL-CIO members supported Wallace in the summer of ‘68. In September of 1968, Wallace was the preferred candidate of Chicago steelworkers, taking 44 percent of their support.
Soon-to-be President Richard Nixon, however, with the help of a young Patrick Buchanan, turned the tide. Nixon argued that a vote for Wallace was ultimately a vote for Humphrey. He also hammered away at Alabama being a right-to-work state. While it is often argued that Nixon pursued a “Southern strategy,” this is patently false. Nixon’s strategy was two-fold: He sought to win on the basis of massive turnout from Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants, the latter category including Southern black voters.
Author: Frances Rice