(During the '72 campaign, he was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair.) Wallace ran as a Democrat in 1972 and again in 1976. He carried five states, sweeping most of the Deep South - Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and his home state of Alabama.Īs the American Independent Party candidate, he won 46 electoral votes, the last third-party presidential candidate to win any electoral votes. Wallace shocked political pundits by winning nearly 10 million popular votes in the 1968 general election. Wallace's most trusted political aides, at home in 2016. Snider has been watching this year's race with great interest.Ĭharlie Snider, one of Gov. Snider, now 84, was chairman of two of Wallace's four presidential campaigns. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems,' Trump declared when he announced he was running for president. 'They've been used as a doormat long enough.' 5th in this country,' Wallace said to a shouting crowd in 1968. 'I want to tell these national parties this - they're going to find out there are a lot of rednecks come Nov. He berated both the federal government and the national political parties for being out of touch with average Americans. Wallace's racial rhetoric on this national stage was more coded. Tens of thousands turned out in major Northeastern cities like Boston and New York. 'We want Wallace! We want Wallace!' supporters would chant, as he took the stage at elaborate rallies that typically featured live country music acts. In 1968, running as a third-party candidate, he drew large crowds to ever-more raucous rallies. 'They both were able to adopt the notion that fear and hate are the two greatest motivators of voters that feel alienated from government,' she said.Ī supporter cheers with the crowd before Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Berlin, Md., on Wednesday. She believes Trump is exploiting voters' worst instincts, the way her late father once did. Wallace Kennedy was 18 when she was on the campaign trail with her father in 1968. 'Trump and my father say out loud what people are thinking but don't have the courage to say,' Peggy Wallace Kennedy told NPR. Wallace's daughter, a Democrat, hears it, too, but in a different way. 'We're looking at a modern-day George Wallace.' 'It's just a replay,' Charlie Snider, one of Wallace's most trusted political aides, told NPR. Wallace allies and family see parallels today in Trump. When Wallace entered presidential politics in 1964, the then-Alabama governor was famous for declaring, 'Segregation now. George Wallace on the campaign trail in 1968

The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter