Wallace 1968 (A terrible fluke)

What if George Wallace on a Wallace-Chandler ticket had won in 1968?

I'm thinking the Republicans nominate Romney, the Democrats give it to Johnson at convention, and Eugene McCarthy runs third-party.

With three candidates splitting the liberal vote, Wallace eeks out a win by consolidating the south and getting some midwest hardhat voters. A Mid-September AFL-CIO poll had 1 in 3 union voters backing Wallace, and the Chicago Sun-Times found that 44% of White Steelworkers in Chicago supported him. Wallace's Madison Square Garden rally was the biggest since FDR's.

Reading up on, it's pretty unnerving to see how much northern support there was for Wallace in 1968. What if he'd fluked his way into the Presidency in 1968?
 
To get 270 electoral votes, Wallace would have had to carry every state where he got more than nine percent in OTL! Work it out for yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1968 This is not going to happen whether there are three, four, or five parties, and no matter who the other candidates are and who he chooses as his running mate.

So he had a big rally at Madison Square Garden? So what? His audience was clearly not representative of Tri-State area voters: He ended up with 5 percent of the vote in New York state, six percent in Connecticut and nine percent in New Jersey.

And whatever polls may have shown about his support among white Chicago steelworkers (who incidentally were not a very large percent of the population of Illinois even in 1968) he ended up with 8.46 percent of the Illinois vote.

BTW, if Romney were to be nominated, this would just show that he had avoided major mistakes and was satisfactory to somewhat-conservative Republicans. With the core Republican vote, I think he would fairly easily win your hypothetical election, given the divisions of the Democratic party and the fact that Wallace in OTL did not do better than 13 percent (in Nevada) in any state that did not have slavery at the time of the ACW.
 
2016 means all previous assumptions are defunct.

I think it's better to judge Wallace's peospects in 1968 by the number of votes he actually got (rather then assume it could be magically doubled or tripled with aid of Happy Chandler) than by Trump's showing in 2016. (BTW, the national polls on average were very close to the actual result in 2016, closer in fact than they had been in 2012! Compare https://www.realclearpolitics.com/e...rump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html with https://www.realclearpolitics.com/e...us/general_election_romney_vs_obama-1171.html)

(And in any event Trump was the candidate of a major party, not a third party.)
 
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I think it's more likely that Wallace somehow becomes President through contingent election shenanigans by throwing it to the House rather than winning outright
 
I think it's more likely that Wallace somehow becomes President through contingent election shenanigans by throwing it to the House rather than winning outright

There's just no way Wallace is going to win in the House. What he was seeking was leverage to force Nixon to make concessions.
 
Wallace polled up to 20% in September before dropping to 13.5% ultimately, and this was with the very terrible Curtis LeMay dragging down the ticket.

Chandler was popular and a mainstream liberal democrat.

Here the liberal vote is being split three-ways between the unpopular Johnson, Nixon, and McCarthy.
 
Wallace polled up to 20% in September before dropping to 13.5% ultimately, and this was with the very terrible Curtis LeMay dragging down the ticket.

Chandler was popular and a mainstream liberal democrat.

Here the liberal vote is being split three-ways between the unpopular Johnson, Nixon, and McCarthy.

Third party candidates almost invariably poll better in September than they actually do in November, but in any event with the liberal vote split between Johnson and McCarthy, Nixon (with the core Republican vote) would easily win even if Wallace got 20 percent or (very improbably) even better. (I don't quite get how you think McCarthy's candidacy will hurt the Republicans.) The best Wallace could do would be to force the election into the House where he would have no chance of being a winner as opposed to a kingmaker.

And again, voters do not pay one-tenth as much attention to running mates as people here seem to believe as the example of Quayle in 1988 shows. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...minute/2000/06/nobody_votes_for_the_veep.html But if you think Wallace could win, just show me your map of how he gets to 270. To do this, he will have to carry some states where in OTL he finished in single digits!
 
Third party candidates almost invariably poll better in September than they actually do in November, but in any event with the liberal vote split between Johnson and McCarthy, Nixon (with the core Republican vote) would easily win even if Wallace got 20 percent or (very improbably) even better. (I don't quite get how you think McCarthy's candidacy will hurt the Republicans.) The best Wallace could do would be to force the election into the House where he would have no chance of being a winner as opposed to a kingmaker.

And again, voters do not pay one-tenth as much attention to running mates as people here seem to believe as the example of Quayle in 1988 shows. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...minute/2000/06/nobody_votes_for_the_veep.html But if you think Wallace could win, just show me your map of how he gets to 270. To do this, he will have to carry some states where in OTL he finished in single digits!

I meant to say the liberals are split between Johnson, Romney, and McCarthy.
 
I meant to say the liberals are split between Johnson, Romney, and McCarthy.

If Romney wins the GOP nomination, that means he was satisfactory to conservatives and will therefore get the core Republican vote as Nixon did in OTL. That will be quite enough to win, with the Democrats divided between LBJ and McCarthy.
 
If Romney wins the GOP nomination, that means he was satisfactory to conservatives and will therefore get the core Republican vote as Nixon did in OTL. That will be quite enough to win, with the Democrats divided between LBJ and McCarthy.

I'll give you a scenario: Romney is in the lead against Nixon, but doesn't get enough delegates at the convention, throws it to Rockefeller (let's make it worse: Rockefeller isn't even in the race in this world) as part of a deal where for his delegates, and for undecided delegates, Romney gets the vice presidency. Conservatives are massively pissed, and Romney (as much or not as much of a bargain bin tolerable Rockefeller for the Conservatives) gets tainted.
 
The only real chance he has is to get himself on the top of the Democratic ticket. Which could prove doable given the right set of circumstances. An assassination attempt that he quickly recovers from may give him a hefty boost too
 
The only real chance he has is to get himself on the top of the Democratic ticket. Which could prove doable given the right set of circumstances. An assassination attempt that he quickly recovers from may give him a hefty boost too

The most plausible way for Wallace to become president--not very plausible but still more plausible than any other way--is for a Humphrey-Wallace ticket to win in 1972, and for Humphrey to die in office. We discussed such a ticket at http://www.alternatehistory.net/Discussion/showthread.php... As I stated in that thread, "Undoubtedly, John T. Amos, Humphrey's envoy, did give Wallace the impression that Humphrey was favorable to a Humphrey-Wallace ticket. For the very skeptical views of Norman Sherman and other former Humphrey aides that Humphrey was indeed planning on putting Wallace on the ticket (or had actually offered him that position), see http://books.google.com/books?id=uzJ7-p31HRwC&pg=PA489 I think Amos would have promised Wallace the moon; whether Humphrey had actually authorized his promises in anything more than general terms ("well, see what you can do with George, John") is another matter." http://ww.alternatehistory.net/Discussion/showpost.php...
 
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I maintain that the clusterfuck that was 1968 means you can find a way to make it happen.

It was really not a clusterfuck so far as Republicans were concerned. They got a candidate satisfactory for most of their party and he got the core Republican vote--which was enough. If the Democrats had been in even deeper disarray (as in the OP with a McCarthy third party candidacy) the GOP would have won more easily.
 
It was really not a clusterfuck so far as Republicans were concerned. They got a candidate satisfactory for most of their party and he got the core Republican vote--which was enough. If the Democrats had been in even deeper disarray (as in the OP with a McCarthy third party candidacy) the GOP would have won more easily.

The nation was in disarray. For the scenario, put the GOP into disarray. I already made my suggestion on that bit. And to add onto my proposed Rockefeller/Romney "betrayal" ticket, have Reagan do better leading up to the convention for it to really stick it to the Conservatives and make blood on the floor of the Republican convention when not only does Romney not get the nomination, but neither does Reagan, nor Nixon, and Rockefeller swoops in as this figure that was never in the primaries but still got it.
 
The nation was in disarray. For the scenario, put the GOP into disarray. I already made my suggestion on that bit. And to add onto my proposed Rockefeller/Romney "betrayal" ticket, have Reagan do better leading up to the convention for it to really stick it to the Conservatives and make blood on the floor of the Republican convention when not only does Romney not get the nomination, but neither does Reagan, nor Nixon, and Rockefeller swoops in as this figure that was never in the primaries but still got it.

The GOP wasn't close to being in disarray. It would not have nominated anyone too liberal for most Republicans, especially not Rockefeller. It would either have nominated Nixon or (especially if he had started earlier) Reagan or in case of a deadlock some center-right candidate other than Nixon. Whoever would be nominated would get the core Republican vote, and that would probably be enough to win, and certainly enough to prevent Wallace from getting a majority in the Electoral College.

Once again let me repeat: To win a majority in the Electoral College Wallace would have to have won every state where in OTL he got more than nine percent of the vote. That's not 29% or 19% but 9%! Wallace could face five different opponents (even assuming none of them cut into his own vote!) and have any runnng mate you choose and he still couldn't transform that into anything like a majority.

(I have a feeling that many people today are more willing to believe in implausible scenarios because they think that "Trump proves anything is possible." But he really doesn't--at least so far as general elections are concerned. Trump was the candidate of one of the two major parties--and indeed the one that by most historical standards was favored to win the 2016 election. He won for many reasons but above all because he got the normal Republican vote, though he added to it in some places, and subtracted from it in others. I can see the argument that Trump shows some seemingly unlikely people can get major party nominations, but that's another matter.)
 
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