WI: George Wallace in 1964

Originally, Wallace was considering a third party run in 1964. He stepped aside as a result of Goldwater becoming the Republican candidate, and representing the policy issues he was interested in running on and wished to challenge the establishment in regards to (namely, government intervention on civil rights). However, had it been Nelson Rockefeller or another Republican, Wallace would have likely made an attempt. In either case, what if George Wallace had made a bid for the presidency as an independent candidate in 1964?
 
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Lyndon B. Johnson/Hubert Humphrey:458 EVs
George Wallace/Curtis Lemay: 77 EVs
Nelson Rockefeller/???: 3 EVs
 
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In the very unlikely event he is nominated in 1964 (he would not be anywhere near having the necessary delegates even if he beat Goldwater in winner-take-all California), Rocky is certainly not going to choose Stassen as his running mate, and not just because Stassen was a joke by 1964. Rocky would try to reach out to conservatives by picking a fairly conservative running mate, preferably from the Midwest or West. (He was used to ticket-balancing, running in New York with Malcolm Wilson, a conservative, as his Lieutenant Governor.) He would of course lose to LBJ, but he would win the core Republican vote (despite some abstentions and even defections to Wallace) outside the South, and I think having him only carry VT is very improbable.
 
In the very unlikely event he is nominated in 1964 (he would not be anywhere near having the necessary delegates even if he beat Goldwater in winner-take-all California), Rocky is certainly not going to choose Stassen as his running mate, and not just because Stassen was a joke by 1964. Rocky would try to reach out to conservatives by picking a fairly conservative running mate, preferably from the Midwest or West. (He was used to ticket-balancing, running in New York with Malcolm Wilson, a conservative, as his Lieutenant Governor.) He would of course lose to LBJ, but he would win the core Republican vote (despite some abstentions and even defections to Wallace) outside the South, and I think having him only carry VT is very improbable.

Rockefeller was the designated front runner circa 1963, with Republican moderates and liberals behind him, until he divorced his wife in early 1963. It was a move Kennedy, behind closed doors, called dumb and political suicide, and it was. Rockefeller was done at that point, which lead everyone to leave him behind. He still ran regardless, the rest of the moderates and liberals looked to any candidate but Rockefeller (Scranton and so on), and Goldwater ran through his weak competition and his momentum propelled him to the nomination. Also bear in mind, Goldwater did refuse to run after the Kennedy assassination. He was friends with Kennedy. He was only later convinced to make the run he was previously undertaking until he briefly dropped out of consideration. So you can keep Rockefeller from divorcing his wife for his mistress. And you can even keep Goldwater out of the race for the nomination on top of that.
 
Question for the community: I've said before, and I have said it recently that there are a lot of PODs stemming from the Kennedy assassination and that overall period that many people do not even know about. It really is a ripe period to cover, because it looked like it was going to be Kennedy vs Goldwater and normality, and it quickly became very different. And the situation we got was normal compared to how chaotic it really could have been, or how many differences there could have been. People focus on Kennedy avoiding assassination, but there are a lot of very interesting possibilities stemming from the assassination that do not have enough attention paid to them.

I debated doing a thread overall on the topic of PODs resulting from the assassination. However, I don't know if there's enough meat of discussion to do it, how to focus the topic, or how exactly to format the topic.
 
My guess is if Rockerfella won the California Primary a compromise would run as the Republican

This is certainly possible, but there is a rebuttal: "Goldwater had 883 votes out of 1308 on the first ballot. California had only 86 votes. Even if Goldwater lost CA, he still has 140 delegates to spare. CA was a narrow win for Goldwater, a narrow loss is not going to scare a horde of informally pledged delegates and make them bolt to other candidates. 1/5 of the OTL Goldwater votes have to bolt to deny him the majority. The California primary was late, and most of the delegates were already chosen."

My rebuttal to the rebuttal:

"I am not certain about that, for this reason: Once it is clear that a candidate is going to win the nomination, he gets a *lot* of votes from people who were not hard-core supporters. He gets people who were only mildly leaning toward him and some who were genuinely undecided or even opposed but who figured that there is no point bucking the inevitable.

"I do not think it implausible that there were at least 140 delegates who voted for Goldwater who might have been dissuaded from doing so. Goldwater himself said in an ABC television interview on May 14 that there would be "four hundred and twenty-five" hard-core delegates--he was assuming a victory in the California primary--who "will stay right to the end and march out the back of the convention if they don't get what they want. That is how hard these people are." (Quoted in George Gilder and Bruce Chapman, *The Party That Lost Its Head* [1966], p. 196; an interesting look at 1964 from a liberal Republican perspective--yes, George Gilder was a liberal Republican in those days!...) Gilder and Chapman note that "450 delegates, no matter how militant, cannot win a convention, and Goldwater at the end had some 400 more." They were for the most part ordinary Republicans, on the conservative side, but not ideological zealots. The California primary was important not only for the delegates it directly brought Goldwater but for the way it persuaded such Republicans that Goldwater was in the mainstream and might actually win. If Goldwater had lost in California--a little more than two weeks after finishing *third* in Oregon--such delegates might have stopped to ask themselves: If he can't win Republican primaries in the West, just where, outside the South and perhaps a few die-hard Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states, *can* he win in November?

'Also, a Goldwater defeat in California might have led both Eisenhower and Nixon to have taken a harder anti-Goldwater line than in OTL, and this would probably have had some influence on wavering delegates. Furthermore, IIRC there were a couple of "favorite sons" (Governor James Rhodes in Ohio? Congressman John W. Byrnes in Wisconsin?) who withdrew, and who, if they had stayed in the race, might have helped to deprive Goldwater of a first-ballot victory..." https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/Ghzn1YByCDA/ww4p3unAnz8J
 
Rockefeller was the designated front runner circa 1963, with Republican moderates and liberals behind him, until he divorced his wife in early 1963. It was a move Kennedy, behind closed doors, called dumb and political suicide, and it was. Rockefeller was done at that point, which lead everyone to leave him behind. He still ran regardless, the rest of the moderates and liberals looked to any candidate but Rockefeller (Scranton and so on), and Goldwater ran through his weak competition and his momentum propelled him to the nomination. Also bear in mind, Goldwater did refuse to run after the Kennedy assassination. He was friends with Kennedy. He was only later convinced to make the run he was previously undertaking until he briefly dropped out of consideration. So you can keep Rockefeller from divorcing his wife for his mistress. And you can even keep Goldwater out of the race for the nomination on top of that.
Whoops
 
He gets ROFLstomped, maybe takes a couple states. LBJ would have won that election if he had unzipped his pants and banged a dead girl, a live boy, and a billy goat live on stage at the DNC. America wasn't going to elect a third President in a year.
 
He gets ROFLstomped, maybe takes a couple states. LBJ would have won that election if he had unzipped his pants and banged a dead girl, a live boy, and a billy goat live on stage at the DNC. America wasn't going to elect a third President in a year.

The topic doesn't assume Wallace would win, but the issue at hand is everything that would result from this. Declaring a separation from the National Democratic party this early could lead to an earlier, more intense division between the Northern and Southern Democrats which upsets the two-parties-under-one-tent status quo, and splits the party asunder with greater haste. Or, given that in 1964 Wallace is going to look more like a segregationist since he can't really run on latter 1960s White resentments of "Law and Order", it may put him in a worse rather than better position in 1968 to either gain the Democratic nomination or to build a coalition in another independent run with which to gain the nomination in 1972.
 
If we go with a Rockefeller 1964 scenario, then that could put him out of the running for 1968. It could also put him in a stronger position, if not to win the nomination, then to make the race for the nomination contentious enough to cause some interesting results and factional infighting, which could give us an interesting nominee. Nixon could make a comeback. George Romney could be in a stronger position if Rockefeller is weaker in this race for the nomination. If he were stronger, Romney would not consider running in 1968. He may try to position himself as his running mate, if or even if he were the running mate in 1964. Goldwater could also be a contender in this alternate 1968, or he may give that over to Ronald Reagan. However, if Goldwater were not the nominee in 1964, Reagan does not make his "Time For Choosing" speech, and is on a disputably weaker political trajectory coming out of 1964 which may or may not change enough to put him in a good position against Brown for the governorship in 1966, or the Republican presidential race in 1968.
 
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