# 1968 Presidential Election The realigning election that completed the operational consolidation of the **Southern Strategy** and inaugurated the modern Republican Party as a Southern-anchored conservative coalition. [[Richard Nixon]] (Republican) defeated Vice President [[Hubert Humphrey]] (Democrat) by 301 to 191 electoral votes — a 0.7% popular-vote margin in one of the closest popular votes since 1880. **Alabama Governor George Wallace**, running on the segregationist American Independent Party ticket, carried **5 Deep South states** (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi) and 46 electoral votes — the most significant third-party [[Electoral College]] performance since 1912. The election was conducted in the aftermath of an extraordinary year: the Tet Offensive (January-February), Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the race (March 31), the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 5), the Chicago Democratic National Convention riots (August), and accelerating cultural rupture over Vietnam, civil rights, and the counterculture. Nixon's campaign messaging — built around "**law and order**," the "**silent majority**," and an implicit but unmistakable framing of the Democratic Party as the party of urban disorder, anti-war protest, and racial conflict — operationalized the Southern Strategy that the [[Goldwater 1964]] campaign had pioneered and that Republican strategist Kevin Phillips would document in his 1969 book *The Emerging Republican Majority*. The Nixon coalition assembled the formerly-Wallace Southern white vote, Northern blue-collar "ethnic" voters anxious about civil rights and busing, and traditional Republican constituencies into the structural majority that would govern American politics for the next four decades. ## Result - **[[Richard Nixon]]** (Republican) — 301 electoral votes, 43.4% popular (31,783,783 votes) - **Hubert Humphrey** (Democrat) — 191 electoral votes, 42.7% popular (31,271,839 votes) - **[[George Wallace]]** (American Independent) — 46 electoral votes (5 Deep South states), 13.5% popular (9,901,118 votes) - Total: 538 electoral votes - Turnout: 60.7% ## Right-wing significance The 1968 election is the operational completion of the 1964-detonated Southern realignment. The structural mechanics were specific: Wallace's third-party run carried the Deep South votes that would have gone to Goldwater in 1964 and would go to Republican nominees consistently from 1972 onward; Nixon's Border South victories (Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina) plus his industrial-Midwest victories built the new Republican majority; Humphrey's coalition (the [[New Deal]] coalition minus the Wallace defectors) was no longer a national-electoral majority. By 1972 the realignment was complete: Nixon would carry 49 states; the New Deal coalition was finished as a structural electoral majority. The Southern Strategy's mechanism — the use of race-coded but not racially-explicit appeals to mobilize white voters concerned about civil rights and demographic change — is one of the most extensively-documented patterns in American political history. The Atwater quote from a 1981 interview (acknowledging the "abstract" shift from explicit racial slurs in 1954 to coded fiscal-policy language in 1968 and beyond) is the canonical primary-source documentation of the strategy. The contemporary right's relationship to this history is contested; the structural outcome — the modern Republican Party as the Southern-anchored conservative coalition — is not in dispute. The Wallace 1968 run is also significant as the precursor to subsequent populist-right third-party challenges (Buchanan 1992 primary insurgency, Perot 1992 and 1996, the broader Trump 2016 mobilization which absorbed substantial parts of the Wallace constituency-template into the Republican Party itself). ## Connections - [[Richard Nixon]] — Winner; political comeback from 1960 loss and 1962 California gubernatorial loss. - [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] — Outgoing president; withdrew March 31; the [[Vietnam War]] destroyed his second-term prospects. - [[George Wallace]] — Third-party candidate; carried 5 Deep South states; the operational bridge between Dixiecrat 1948 and Republican Southern dominance from 1972 onward. - [[Party Realignment]] — The canonical Southern-realignment election. - [[Southern Strategy]] — Operationalized in 1968; completed by Nixon's 1972 reelection. ---