Challenge: George Wallace as Democratic nominee

Let him win his campaigns in Alabama as a populist candidate. Have him serve his career as such as a Southern politician presenting himself nationally as an anti-Lester Maddox(early model Jimmy Carter). Nixon's Watergate politics unravel years sooner, with Nixon crippled in 1972 just enough for a blue dog Southern Democrat to present himself as a viable candidate against a GOP President who broke his promise to "end the war." With the Democrats splintering, and only McGovern's arch-leftwing candidacy as an alternative...

Wait-a-minute. I thought you said 1951.:eek: Um, no. ASB. Not with the confrontation at the school entrance. Never happen. Not in this world. By the time he'd gained forgiveness for his previous actions, he was too old and infirm for the job.
 
Close to impossible. You'd have to materially change the 1972 primary environment in a way that weakens McGovern and strengthens Wallace. The only way to weaken McGovern and the antiwar wing of the party is to end the Vietnam War, which isn't possible with a 1971 POD. You could possibly strengthen Wallace by increasing racial discord in the North, but I don't think that alone is enough to give him the nomination. Wallace would still have opposition from the party establishment, particularly big-city bosses like Daley, who realized the value of black voters to their local fiefdoms. Moreover, you'd have to make the Wallace campaign as good or better than McGovern's, which is a tall order. Yes, they got blown out in the general, but the primary campaign was far better than that of any of his opponents.
 
Well aside from this...

Wallace never gets shot, Muskie wins the nomination, Wallace runs a 3rd party campaign where he redefines his segregationist image to a "more law and order type", Wallace wins the nomination in '76.
 
Keep him from being shot. He was well on his way to getting there in 1972, as suggested by his WWC support throughout much of the Rustbelt. Dixie he has in the bag, and the rest of the potential candidates are too divided to put forward a credible, single "stop Wallace" candidate.
 
I don't think so. After MD it was Michigan, but white, middle-class Oregon is not going to take to Wallace. Even a win in NM will not change much because he didn't compete in the industrial states such as Illinois and Ohio. Big Labor, which saved the Dems from a third-place finish in '68, would not allow that to happen. They saw the polls in '68 that showed anywhere from 1/3 to 43% of their members in various locals supporting Wallace before they went DefCon 1 to quell the fires. Worst comes to worst the bosses rig it again as they nearly did in California and the public will forgive them because it's Wallace.
 
I don't think so. After MD it was Michigan, but white, middle-class Oregon is not going to take to Wallace. Even a win in NM will not change much because he didn't compete in the industrial states such as Illinois and Ohio. Big Labor, which saved the Dems from a third-place finish in '68, would not allow that to happen. They saw the polls in '68 that showed anywhere from 1/3 to 43% of their members in various locals supporting Wallace before they went DefCon 1 to quell the fires. Worst comes to worst the bosses rig it again as they nearly did in California and the public will forgive them because it's Wallace.

You can have a rally against Wallace, but I think Michigan breaks his way, and unless Ohio and Illinois go the same way, there numbers just aren't there without another rancorous convention.
 
Michigan did break his way IOTL, 51-39. If OH and IL do the same, then there would be the choice of suppressing democracy or self-nuking.

Also: Ted Kennedy said the only way he could possibly be a candidate is if Wallace was about to, for personal reasons he had to oppose everything Wallace stood for.
 
Michigan did break his way IOTL, 51-39. If OH and IL do the same, then there would be the choice of suppressing democracy or self-nuking.

Also: Ted Kennedy said the only way he could possibly be a candidate is if Wallace was about to, for personal reasons he had to oppose everything Wallace stood for.

So, if Wallace performs well in the primaries after Maryland, would Ted Kennedy or someone else rally the anti-Wallace factions of the party?
 
So, if Wallace performs well in the primaries after Maryland, would Ted Kennedy or someone else rally the anti-Wallace factions of the party?

I'd imagine yes. Teddy wasn't going to run in 1972 unless A) he was either guranteed a win or B) things were so bad that running was the only way to save the Democratic Party.
 
McGovern still had a lead, but it would get messy at the convention and require Daley's intervention again. All hell breaks loose. Ted Kennedy would not be a candidate himself because anyone running against Nixon in '72 is on a kamikaze mission.
 
So, if Wallace performs well in the primaries after Maryland, would Ted Kennedy or someone else rally the anti-Wallace factions of the party?

I'[m wondering if the prospect of a Wallace nomination might have been enough to push the party establishment and the McGovernites into cooperating with each other for the purpose of stopping Wallace. The Daleys and Meanys of the Party may have detested the anti-war wing, but a Wallace nomination would have been very destabilizing to some of the big city machines and labor. It's not all that ridiculous to see them coming together to stop Wallace by uniting behind a candidate in exchange for putting McGovern on the ticket as VP and putting a strong anti-war plank in the party platform.
 

JoeMulk

Banned
I'[m wondering if the prospect of a Wallace nomination might have been enough to push the party establishment and the McGovernites into cooperating with each other for the purpose of stopping Wallace. The Daleys and Meanys of the Party may have detested the anti-war wing, but a Wallace nomination would have been very destabilizing to some of the big city machines and labor. It's not all that ridiculous to see them coming together to stop Wallace by uniting behind a candidate in exchange for putting McGovern on the ticket as VP and putting a strong anti-war plank in the party platform.

Maybe a Muskie/McGovern ticket then.
 
Let's take the obvious point of divergence and see if Wallace ends up coming close to the nomination. Presumably, without the assassination attempt, Wallace would have campaigned more actively in the primaries that followed. Presumably, Wallace would have won in both Maryland and Michigan by margins comparable to how the elections actually turned out. But Wallace is able to campaign thereafter much more actively.

As Roguebeaver mentions, however much he campaigns, he is not likely to win in Oregon. My sense is that Rhode Island won't be favorable towards him either. I think Wallace's more active involvement in the California may actually make McGovern's victory there all the more convincing. If Wallace does better, he's probably taking away votes from Humphrey in that primary. McGovern voters are more unlikely to switch to Wallace in my opinion. New Jersey doesn't change. Wallace did rather well in New Mexico, so a win there may not be inconceivable. South Dakota is McGovern's home territory.

So, Wallace denies McGovern some delegates from New Mexico, making McGovern ever so much weaker. Those delegates alone won't give Wallace the nomination, but they probably hurt McGovern slightly.

You probably see a slightly stronger "Stop McGovern" effort. Politics makes strange bedfellows after all. McGovern's supporters may fail in the fight over credentials and how the California delegation is distributed. Perhaps such a scenario isn't entirely likely, but if the stop McGovern group is more successful, the nomination becomes slightly more open. However, given the vote splitting effect, McGovern may have done even better in California than he actually did. If absolutely everything goes right for the "Stop McGovern crowd" I think you still won't see Wallace nominated. I think Hubert Humphrey would be nominated again, after having made some kind of a backroom deal with George Wallace, or at least his supporters. A McGovern nomination is considerably more likely than Humphrey somehow obtaining the nomination despite having lost the primary.

Of course, the most likely course of events is that the convention is slightly more eventful, the Stop McGovern group does slightly better, but in the end McGovern is nominated.
 
Wallace is going to take WWC votes from Humphrey. Places like Norwalk or Terre Haute.

If Humphrey is nominated again then the New Left is still influential because they haven't been destroyed in electoral battle. The Democratic civil war might be a two-way one: New Left v. stillborn DLC rather than New Deal v. DLC as was the case from '73 to '85.
 
Wallace is going to take WWC votes from Humphrey. Places like Norwalk or Terre Haute.

If Humphrey is nominated again then the New Left is still influential because they haven't been destroyed in electoral battle. The Democratic civil war might be a two-way one: New Left v. stillborn DLC rather than New Deal v. DLC as was the case from '73 to '85.

That was my thinking as well, Wallace siphons the working class vote from Humphrey, leading to a larger McGovern lead in California, but a slight Wallace win in New Mexico.

If Humphrey is the nominee the primaries in 1976. I can see a race that comes down to McGovern vs. Wallace, not sure how such a race turns out.
 
Top