An essential point of the Dixiecrat movement was the claim that they were *not* a third party, that they simply represented the Democratic Party in their states--this was an important thing to assert, in view of the South's traditional attachment to the Democratic Party. And indeed, the only states Thurmond was able to carry were those where he was listed as the state's Democratic candidate for president, and *Truman* had to run as (in effect) a third party candidate. That's why Truman lost heavily in South Carolina and won easily in Georgia--the two states' racial attitudes probably differed little, but in SC (apart from his home state advantage) Thurmond was listed as the Democratic candidate and in Georgia he was not. There would simply have been no point in running candidates against anti-civil-rights Democrats in the Deep South.
As for the AIP, it meant very little to most of its voters; it was just a vehicle for Wallace. One test of the AIP's strength was a special election in the Tennessee Eighth Congressional District in March 1969. "George Wallace, who had carried the 8th with nearly 50 percent of the vote un 1968, [it was 48% for Wallace, 28% for Humphrey, 24% for Nixon--DT] came in to campaign for the American party candidate William Davis, while Sen. Baker and other conservative Republicans stumped for the Republican, Leonard Dunavant. The race got some attention in the national press as a test of the Wallace and Nixon strategies in the South.
"The result made both look rather bad. Davis won 25%, Dunavant took 24%, and the winner, conservative Democrat Ed Jones, won 51%, and an absolute majority of the race. Jones, former commissioner of agriculture, had not asked outsiders to campaign for him; he wisely relied on the traditional Democratic sentiments of the voters of his district. These people may plunk for Wallace in a presidential election, and they may applaud some of the policies of the Nixon Administration, but most of them preferred to stay with a Tennessee Democrat in what is, after all, a local election. Then too, against Wallace- and Nixon-backed candidates, Jones win the black vote with no effort at all..." *Almanac of American Politics 1970*, p. 772.