Talk Elections

https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-WALLACE-TRAILS-NIXON-BY-LARGEST-MARGIN-1972-05.pdf


Nixon led Wallace in a two way race 50-41 in the South and only trailed Wallace 45-46 in the Deep South .

I imagine you would have actually gotten a pretty similar county split to Reagan/Carter in 1980, as uncomfortable as that is for the "Dixiecrats were the first to switch to the GOP" narrative.

Based on that, I would guess this would have been the map if that poll had been accurate and Wallace was the nominee:


()


Nixon hits 60% in every non-Southern state save for Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Wallace only wins two states - Mississippi (by a margin of something like 56-44) and his home state of Alabama (by a margin of something like 65-35). Nixon wins Louisiana with a plurality but obtains a majority of the vote in every other Southern state. New England and the West Coast swing massively towards Nixon as compared to the actual 1972 results, while the South swings massively towards Wallace. I wasn't sure about DC but since this is a two-way match-up without a major third party, I assumed it would vote for Nixon as Nixon definitely would have won the black vote vs. Wallace if there was no left-wing third party. overall Nixon wins the Electoral College 522 to 16 and the Popular Vote by a margin of something like 64-36.

There would have been some major differences as compared to 1980. Nixon would have done way better with black voters than Reagan and much worse with Deep South whites, even compared to Carter's very decent showing with that group. Nixon also would have done a lot better than Reagan in New England.

My point is that Reagan did not win the Southern states that he won in 1980 by winning the areas that had supported Wallace in 1968.  He won those states by thin margins due to suburban strength, and he lost most of the counties that the eloquent users of Atlas would now classify as filled with "racist hicks" - voters that went to Carter, per county results.

Wallace '72 is still the nomination that would've done most to change present American politics.

Except GA would be more like MS 1980 and AL and MS would be like GA 1980

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that "the eloquent users of Atlas" wouldn't see Nixon counties as also being "filled with racist hicks".

Maybe black voters would have delivered a handful of Southern states to Nixon.


Well, Nixon only got 14% in Alabama and Mississippi in 1968.  As Reagan just barely carried these states over Carter, he needed plenty of Wallace voters to do that, and he got them.  Though yes, rural Southerners largely stayed with Carter; perhaps it was suburban Wallace voters in these states who would back Reagan in 1980 (and many of them had even voted for Ford four years earlier).

Yeah, it was more of a comment on this forum's recent obsession with "racist hicks," as if people in rural areas are inherently more racist than those in metro areas ... I'm sure everyone on this site, if it had existed during the 1976 election, would be phrasing Reagan as the more racist of the two.

Suburban southerners are racist hicks.

But even if they weren't, a basic look at the 1980 map shows the counties that Carter won are either black or within the TVA. So, actually, Reagan did very well with Wallace voters.

I think in a realistic what if on Wallace getting the nomination, he would have gotten Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Lousiana, and South Carolina. I think he would have done much better than McGovern electorally, but worse elsewhere. Ironically, I think electorally, he was the democrats best bet in 1972, but in the popular vote, he might have been the worst. So depending on which end you are looking at, he would have represented two ends of the spectrum

It's possible Wallace could have swept the Deep South, but if the poll OP linked was anywhere close to being accurate, he most likely would have won Mississippi and Alabama and absolutely nothing else.

Living in the suburbs and being a hick is contradictory as the term "hick" refers people who live in rural areas. Also, TVA Democrats WERE Wallace voters for the most part...  did you even look at the 1968 map? You also conveniently forgot to mention Arkansas, SW Louisiana, SE Texas, Northern Florida, Georgia, and chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia that can't necessarily be explained away by the black vote. Its pretty obvious that most of the rural Wallace vote was going to Carter in 1980, especially factoring in 12 years of generational turnover.

Trust me, there is a cultural "hick" element in those suburbs you will not find in any other part of the country. Certainly the southern suburbs are racist either way.


Well yeah. I never said otherwise.


Well Reagan lost Pulaski County so that kind of ruins the narrative.


Linguistic/cultural differences. But keep in mind Wallace won nearly every county in LA in 1968 and most of them went to Reagan.



Several of of these counties voted for Humphrey in 1968.


Spillover from GA. Thin margins as well. Note that the central Florida Wallace counties voted for Reagan easy.


Native son effect.


I'm seeing an obvious TVA/black effect in those states. Most of the Wallace vote clearly went to Reagan.


Well, Wallace didn't do well in SC in the first place. I will concede that the state had a different pattern from others, probably because there wasn't much Wallace support in the first place.


I'm mostly just seeing geographic variances among Wallace voters.


Where majority of the Wallace counties voted for Reagan.


No, it's pretty clear a majority of the Wallace vote went to Reagan. By a landslide? No, but it was clearly the trend.

Nixon probably does better in the rural south than Reagan did and worse in the Suburbs . Reagan strength in the Suburbs was more than really any candidate in the post war era but he struggled in rural and working class areas (except in the west) compared to Nixon

Suburbanites are by definition not hicks.

So you're basically admitting the Southern Suburbs were racist then.

Nixon was more racist comparatively than Reagan

There's a big difference between saying, "Racist hicks tended to support Reagan" and "Reagan's supporters tended to be racist hicks."

That's true, but I don't see why Wallace would do very well in the suburbs, except for in Alabama due to home state advantage, and even then he would do worse in suburbs in AL than he would in rural areas.

I'm pretty sure someone like Humphrey or Muskie could have produced a map similar (if somewhat worse) than 1968.

Facts are "narratives" now? I mean it's an objective fact that Dixiecrats were the first to switch to the GOP, in direct response to the Civil Rights Act. Johnson wasn't even allowed on the ballot in Alabama and was labeled "National Democrat" in Mississippi, where he was wiped out by "Mississippi Republican" Goldwater, who himself was wiped out in every single other region of the country, even the slightly less racist upper South. To emphasize, states that had never voted Republican for a century, only ever leaving the Democratic Party to vote for other racist Dixiecrats in 1948 and 1960 (also in response to pro-Civil Rights moves by the Democratic candidate), suddenly voted in massive numbers for a Republican who just so happened to be anti-Civil Rights Act over a southern Democrat who just so happened to have just signed the Civil Rights Act. But I'm sure that had nothing to do with it! It was just a total coincidence that these states fled en masse to a party they had never in their lives even considered voting for before...

And no, Dixie once again voting for a Dixiecrat would mean nothing. Of course they would vote for the most racist candidate regardless of party at that time. But it's a moot point because Wallace couldn't have won the nomination anyway, so he only could have run third party like 1968. The Deep South voting for him then didn't mean they weren't already well on their way towards fully embracing the GOP any more than them doing it again in 1972 would. It would only have delayed the inevitable. Once it was clear the Democrats were done harboring racists but the GOP would welcome them with open arms, they were gone.

Suburban Nixon voters in these states were probably just as racist, and Carter's win in the South in 1976 and narrow loss in 1980 was just an exception that proved the rule. It doesn't somehow mean that the nation wasn't well on its way to an urban/rural re-alignment driven largely by race. It just means that, in two elections where race wasn't a big issue, the last vestiges of the Democratic Party in these states were just strong enough to favor good 'ol boy Jimmy Carter (himself far from racist) over Northern moderate Gerald Ford and Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. But that was cultural, not racial. And it would change by the next election and never let up. So I really don't get your point at all.

"The narrative" is not somehow refuted by Jimmy Carter's performance in rural Southern counties in 1976/1980, nor would it have been refuted by Wallace winning those same counties in 1972. All that you have pointed out is more evidence of the slow but steady party re-alignment that was well underway by this point. Suburban voters in Mississippi hypothetically preferring the slightly less racist Republican Richard Nixon while rural voters hypothetically preferred the more explicitly racist Dixiecrat George Wallace would not somehow mean the realignment wasn't happening or that race had nothing to do with it. Party re-alignments are typically slow processes that take decades to fully take shape, and this one started as far back as 1944 at least, when FDR started bleeding some support to Dixiecrat electors.

Also, for the record, Goldwater (who Reagan supported) won every single county in Mississippi, and he did best among rural counties. And even if it were true that those rural counties were the last to flip solidly Republican, all that would mean is that generations of heavily entrenched Democratic support were hard to shake off completely. It doesn't at all refute the overall "narrative" of the South as a whole flocking to the GOP at the precise moment the Democratic Party abandoned the racism of the Dixiecrats while the GOP dogwhistled to them. It doesn't at all mean that was somehow a coincidence.

KYWildman, you really need to perform more research. The South was trending away from Democrats well before 1964. More well off voters were now able to vote Republican, mainly because of economic and racial reasons. (see the growing suburbs of the East Southern Coast) Now many of these voters went back to the Democrats in 1964, and deep southern Dixiecrats vice versa, but in 1968 they went back to Republicans, as they could afford to. The Dixiecrats, being more fiscally populist, went to George Wallace, as they could not afford to vote Republican. Many outer southerners such as those in WV still voted Democratic as there were less racial tensions in those areas plus because of their economic status.

No, you really need to read my posts in their entirety and comprehend them. I explicitly noted the trend in the South away from the Dems going back since 1944, but it only actually broke for the GOP in 1964. Some of those Deep South states had NEVER voted for a REPUBLICAN before, even if they had broken for a racist Dixiecrat third party candidate against Truman or JFK because they supported Civil Rights. And the absolutely massive swing even from just 1960 to 1964 alone in some of these states cannot be overstated, regardless of any trends. The plain and obvious conclusion is that "racial reasons" was by far the largest contributing factor, and that is what my argument was. I was refuting RINO Tom's nonsensical mental gymnastics trying to explain how ackshually Barry Goldwater and the GOP loved black people and the Democrats have been the real racists all along. I was never denying that the South had been increasingly trending away from the Democrats in direct correlation with the Democrats' trend towards Civil Rights -- that was my entire point!

Its a good thing I found this thread, because some have been using the wrong term to apply to the wrong group of people.

To be specific, Dixiecrat in reference to Wallace. The original Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, was much more conservative and his "best areas" were those in the low countries, suburbs and cities while the upcountry whites retained the most loyalty to Truman. It is these poorer voters that as one person put it couldn't afford to not vote Democratic. By 1968, the former category, The people who had supported the actual Dixiecrats, formed the base for Richard Nixon in the South along with more traditional GOP Mountain counties and of course northern transplants.

The Dixiecrat, referring to the more upscale black belt, urban, low country whites were indeed the first to switch to the Republicans, beginning in 1952.

Now obviously, Thurmond did well in a lot of upcountry areas too and Wallace won a lot of suburbs in the Deep South, but the point refers more to areas of strongest concentration more so than anything else.

The election likely would've been closer in that case but Nixon still wins by a big margin.

Why didn’t Wallace win South Carolina in 1968?

By the way, if you find old historical polls like this, please take a second to add them to the relevant wiki articles on their respective elections. Historic polling is essential to our understanding of elections, and putting the data on Wikipedia increases the chance it will be widely available and disseminated.

What do you mean by “upcountry” and “low countries”?

How bitter and obsessed do you have to be to put the bolded words in my mouth?  in’ weirdo, lol.

I’d love a 1928-1948-1968 comparison.

Because of the suburbs going for Nixon.

Were there more suburbs in SC than in the Wallace states or did the SC suburbs go for Nixon more than the Wallace state suburbs did? If the latter, why?

There weren't really more suburbs in South Carolina than in the states Wallace won, but Wallace lost them by noticeably more than he did in other Southern states. he also didn't overwhelmingly win the rural areas like he did in the rest of the Deep South, only cracking 50% in two counties I believe. there was also more vote splitting between Wallace and Humphrey, with Humphrey doing better at the county level than in the rest of the Deep South, almost entirely because of black support and vote splitting of course.