Former Governor of Alabama George Wallace ran in the 1968 United States presidential election as the candidate for the American Independent Party against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.

This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where Wallace would have bargaining power sufficient to determine, or at least strongly influence, the selection of a winner.

[2] This would presumably give him the role of a power broker; Wallace hoped that southern states could use their influence to end federal efforts toward desegregation.

Wallace's appeal to blue-collar workers and union members (who usually voted Democratic) hurt Hubert Humphrey in Northern states like Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

"[4] These stances were overshadowed by Wallace's running mate, retired Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who implied he would use nuclear weapons to win the war.

Not long after the 1968 campaign, Turnipseed began moving to the political left, joined the Americans for Democratic Action, and became active in the civil rights and environmental movements.

[6] Former Georgia governor Marvin Griffin was a temporary running mate in order to get the Wallace candidacy on the ballot in several states.

The Wallace campaign considered former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, KFC founder Harland Sanders, retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay, Hollywood actor John Wayne, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as possible running mates.

Wallace was cautious: Chandler had supported the hiring of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was now more of a mainstream liberal Democratic politician.

Wallace's aides tried to persuade him to avoid questions relating to the topic, but when asked about it at his first interview, he attempted to dispel American "phobias about nuclear weapons" and discussed radioactive landcrabs at Bikini atoll.

George W. Shannon of the Shreveport Journal, for instance, wrote countless editorials supporting the third-party concept in presidential elections.

In addition to Shannon, Pete Hamill of the New Left magazine Ramparts wrote that "Wallace and the black and radical militants ... share some common ground: local control of schools and institutions, a desire to radically change America, a violent distrust of the power structure and the establishment.

In contrast, George Wallace has been sounding like William Jennings Bryan as he attacked concentrated wealth in his speeches ... From 1960 to 1968 liberal Democrats governed the country.

When he bitched about street crime, he was called a Goldwaterite by liberals who felt secure in the suburbs behind high fences and expensive locks.

On October 24, 1968, Wallace spoke at Madison Square Garden before "the largest political rally held in New York City since Franklin Roosevelt had denounced the forces of 'organized money' from the same stage in 1936".

The American "sickness" had been localized in the person of George Wallace, the "ablest demagogue of our time, with a voice of venom and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of the low-income class."

[4]On the campaign trail, Wallace often repeated this theme, saying: What are the Real issues that exist today in these United States?

It is the trend of the pseudo-intellectual government, where a select, elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions, have spoken from some pulpits, some college campuses, some newspaper offices, looking down their noses at the average man on the street.

A change of around 1% in either Ohio or New Jersey would have also thrown the election to the House, had Wallace carried North Carolina or Tennessee.

Under the United States Constitution, the House of Representatives elects the President in the event no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College.

Had the Democratic delegations all been firmly behind Humphrey, then Wallace might have found himself with little influence on post-election events even if he had succeeded in forcing the election into the House.

An alternative theory holds that had Wallace achieved his aim he could have pre-empted an election in the House by instructing his own electors to back one of the major party candidates – there was no legal or constitutional impediment that would have prevented him from doing so.