To think he was so incredibly popular when he was re-elected in ‘76. Dude won every state except Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, and DC of course.
Simply put, he blasted Nixon in the Republican primaries, calling him a “Negro-loving cuck,” whatever that means. All the voters who were pissed off about the Civil Rights movement, integration, etc. flocked to him, and especially so when George Wallace threw his hat in with the charismatic Manson and became his VP.
But it wasn’t his foreign policy or his antagonizing of the black community that sank Manson - it was the same thing The buoyed him in ‘72 and ‘76 and the same thing that it always comes down to: the damn economy. When that went sour, his approval rating plummeted from the 70s to somewhere in the teens almost overnight. It’s why candidates these days are fond of saying the only color they care about is green.
And when the Secret Service shot Manson dead in an “accident,” they expected Wallace to be just as bad but he turned out to be much better. China never forgave America for nuking Shanghai and bombing Beijing, not to mention turning North Korea into an eventually overthrown puppet state that morphed into some kind of military junta, but Wallace opened relations with Moscow and his influence is credited with warming relations between Moscow and DC.
Wallace couldn’t help the economy, though, and the Second Depression sank the GOP for decades to come.