If Wallace was the 2016 democratic nominee could he of beaten trump?
This is one of the more interesting hypotheticals I’ve seen here. My gut tells me in a straight-up Trump vs. 1968 Wallace match, Trump wins enough black vote to carry the election.
However, Wallace later on publicly renounced segregation, apologized for previous actions, appointed blacks to key positions in state government, and announced he was a born-again Christian. That might have neutralized enough opposition to him to make a respectable showing among African-Americans. Either 1968 or 1980 Wallace probably would have blown Trump away with blue-collar white voters.
But now we have to stipulate that 1980 Wallace hadn’t been shot and paralyzed so Trump couldn’t play the health card.
IOW, to win Wallace would have to be healthy and less racist, two things that never happened at the same time.
Wallace would be almost 100 years old now, so not likely put on a good campaign. The 1968 George Wallace might seem extreme now, but assuming some timely adjustments I think he’d beat Trump because he would seem more genuine to the Joe Six Pack type that were attracted to Trump and turned off by Hillary.
Wallace was more liberal than Trump on economic issues and much better in terms of personal character, so I have a hard time seeing a situation where he doesn’t crush Trump.
That being said, if the 1968 Wallace were around today he wouldn’t be a Democrat, most likely he’d run third party again, Trump and Wallace would split the working class white identity politics vote, and Hillary would limp into the Oval Office with 40% of the vote.
If you don’t win a majority of electoral votes, the election goes to the House. I haven’t done the math, and it might be possible to win the EC with just 40% of the popular vote, but I think it would be very difficult.
But if the George Wallace of 1968 ran in 2017, and was the Democratic candidate, I think a lot of Democrats would either not vote or would write in someone else, like Sanders, and that would ensure a Trump win. Clinton > Sanders + Wallace, and since Trump beat Clinton, I can’t see him losing to that duo.
And that was his actual goal in 1968. He wasn’t trying to get elected.
Much smaller than that. You could certainly win with 25% by winning a majority in states with half the electoral votes and getting no votes in the other half of the states. And as small states get proportionally more than their share of electoral votes you could do it with under 25%.
Going further if only 1 person voted in some states you could win the electoral college with probably 10 popular votes total
Wallace wouldn’t be able to run as a Democrat in 2016. The closest thing was Jim Webb, and he got exactly nowhere in the primaries. I think George Wallace was back from the dead he’d run as a third party candidate.
As for “shares of the electoral vote”, depending on how many minor-party candidates there were you could probably win an EC majority with much less than 40% of the vote.
It depends heavily on how the votes split, but with three significant candidates 40% should almost guarantee someone gets a majority of the electoral vote. This should be similar to getting a majority in Parliament in a FPTP voting system and three significant parties. In Canadian federal politics the boundary between majority and minority governments is right around 37-38%. I can only find one minority government that won over 40% (1963, Lester Pearson’s Liberals won 41.5% and only got 128 of 265 seats). I don’t rule out the possibility that I missed one, but there have been numerous majority Parliaments with 38 or 39% of the popular vote.
In 1992, Bill Clinton won 370 electoral college votes with 43% of the popular vote. With the right states and the right distribution of voters, i think an EC victory with 40% would be pretty easy.
That’s true in post-Wallace third party candidacies where the third party draws pretty equally in all regions. So yeah, the right distribution. Wallace was the last significant third party run to concentrate support in one region, which if it’s on Wallace’s scale actually winning states, is how you can throw an election to the House where the major candidates still get 40% or more. Nixon in 1968 got 301 EV’s with around the same popular % as Clinton.
The basic question is interesting mainly because Trump himself is somewhat similar to Wallace. You can’t compare too closely on issues which have changed somewhat over such a long period. But in both cases it’s a traditionalist populism, not really in sync with ideological conservatism, and some element of white identity politics*. So one answer is yes, ‘Wallace’ can win if he can manage to take over one of the major parties which nowadays would much more likely be the GOP. But it doesn’t seem likely both parties would be taken over by similar Wallace’s or one Wallace would run third party against another Wallace who already had one of the major party nominations.
*as in previous statement, you can’t directly compare IMO Trump’s and Wallace’s racial political angle in a different time. Wallace himself eventually became explicitly anti-racist, at least publicly, though in his run for AL governor in 1970 more openly racist than he’d been nationally in '68.
Maybe I was too vague in my statement, but you’d have to cook up some pretty unusual circumstances to do that. Sure, it would be “easy” once you cooked up those circumstance, but it’s the cooking that’s difficult. Since it has never happened in 250 years, I’m still saying it would be pretty difficult.
Win the presidency? Long shot.
Win the Governorship or Senate seat in Alabama? No problems (look at who is leading the polls for the Senate race to replace Sessions).
A younger version of George Wallace today would probably look something like Wallace in the 1980’s, and not have a legacy of explicitly defending segregation (which Wallace in later years strongly implied was a poll-chasing play on his part more than any matter of personal belief).
I’m aware this is the standard explanation of how Wallace became a segregationist, and the one supplied by numerous commentators, but I think there are some problems with it. Some of Wallace’s statements and actions only make sense if he was (for a while anyway) a true believer in segregation.
Yeah, is there really much difference between a politician who is an actual segregationist, on the one hand, and a politician who adopts segregationist rhetoric to get elected and pursues segregationist policies once in office, on the other?
If you speak like a segregationist and act like a segregationist, then you are one. The post hoc rationalizations are irrelevant.
There’s no doubt that George Wallace had racist politics when he thought that was how to stay popular. And then he changed his tune when trying to appeal to black voters was more politically useful. I think he was a pandering weasel either way,
True, if you follow through all the way to policy actions in any particular direction it’s those policies which matter, not your intentions.
However especially the issue of race from around the time Wallace rose as a national figure actually, tends to be much heavier on symbolism and attaching policies to race as a political tactic than about literally racist policies. As in some small reduction in the rate of growth of the non-defense federal budget is ‘racism’. Not in the same sense as Wallace ‘standing in the door of the schoolhouse’. It’s mainly political mobilization via metaphor to call conservative fiscal policies (and lots of other stuff that gets similarly and even more tenuously so labelled sometimes on the left) ‘racism’. Not that Wallace, or Trump, were conservatives in the modern mold, just as example of how thin the ‘r’ word gets spread in modern politics.
As mentioned above, Wallace sounded more like a racist in his run for AL governor in 1970 than he’d sounded in his presidential run in '68, back to more like he’d sounded for the same local audience some years earlier. But keeping legal segregation was water under the bridge by 1970. Not to say it didn’t matter what ugly passions Wallace appealed to, but the practical issue had changed, and has changed further since.
And here we’re projecting a particular political persona to 40+ yrs after his political heyday. Like I said, I think in some basic ways Trump is what George Wallace would be now (substituting ‘down to earth’ Queens for Alabama affect and so forth). By which I mean basically culturally traditionalist nationalist populism. Which has inevitable racial overtones due to the history and composition of the country. But isn’t actually IMO equivalent to supporting a de jure segregation system in the South (I guess Trump would have been opportunistic enough to be a segregationist if he’d run in a place and time where that would give him positive reinforcement from the crowd, and Wallace wouldn’t now, didn’t even by the 70’s; but that’s different reaction to different circumstances by opportunists, which all politicians are to some degree if not as much as those two).
Clinton won with just 43% in 1992. And he didn’t just eke out 270 EVs: he got 370 EVs.
Strictly speaking a candidate can win with just 11 popular votes! — one vote in each of the most populous states in a very low turnout election. 
Or, even assuming constant turnout and zero third-party votes, a candidate can win with 26% if those votes all come from the 41 least populous states.
If the election goes to the House, then don’t assume that just because you won a state, that you won that state. The House votes how the state’s House delegation wants it to vote, which may or may not be the same way that the people of that state voted. You could have representatives who were from the party the state disfavors, who won just by being extraordinarily skilled candidates. Or, of course, you can have gerrymandering to a sufficient degree that the majority of a state’s House delegation is from a different party than the majority of the state’s people.