Another Way to Look at the Wallace Vote

For the past several posts, I've been looking at the performance of Wallace in several northern cities. In all of these, I've been comparing the Wallace vote against his national performance--13.5%. As we know, Wallace's core strength was in the south where he won five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

To look at this another way, I ran the numbers to allow me to look at Wallace's "non-southern" performance. When we separate out Wallace's southern support, his performance in northern cities becomes all the more impressive, and hence worth dwelling on.

In doing this, I used Kevin Phillip's "The Emerging Republican Majority" as the model. His work, which emphasizes the regional dimension of party competition, defines the south as including: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. So, when we take these states out of the equation, Wallace received 8.8% nationwide.

Looking at the maps posted below in this light, we can see just how important Wallace's candidacy was. In many of these northern urban wards, he more than doubled his "non-southern" performance. Wallace's candidacy was important not just for what it said about American politics in 1968, but for years afterwards.