THE 1968 presidential race," Pollster George Gallup declared last month, "may go into the record books as the one that shattered more traditional voting patterns than any other election of this century."
For months, dissidents of the pro-Wal-lace right and antiwar left threatened to fragment the nation's two-party alignment. The Alabamian, it was feared, would sunder the New Deal coalition of labor, Negroes and ethnic minorities by luring away hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers; disaffected Dem-ocrats—and most Negroes—would sit out the election in disgust or apathy. Richard Nixon predicted confidently that a "silent center" would rise up with an overwhelming mandate for the Republican Party.
It did not turn out quite that way— and an even greater surprise was the extent to which the vote generally followed more traditional party lines. Instead of the convulsive upheaval that many had foreseen, the election was unpredictably normal in several important respects. Up to a point, the voting patterns followed those of 1960; the Democrats drew their strength largely from the big industrial states of the Northeast, plus Michigan, West Virginia, Minnesota and Texas. Richard Nixon, as he had eight years ago, attracted the Republican faithful of the suburbs. He carried virtually the same Midwestern states that he had won against John Kennedy, as well as the entire Far West and several peripheral Southern states, including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.
George Wallace, the dreaded unknown factor, proved to be primarily a sectional candidate after all. His major impact was confined to the Deep South, where, as expected, he and his running mate, Curtis LeMay, carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia. Nowhere in the industrial Northern states did he wrench away a massive blue-collar vote. In Boston's working-class districts, for example, Humphrey tallied 74% of the vote to Wallace's 24%. In poorer white sections of Detroit, pre-election Wallace partisans flocked back to the Democratic Party, joining Negroes, suburban whites and elderly voters to swing Michigan's 21 electoral votes to Humphrey by 151,-000 votes. Many Wallaceites also defected in Southern and Border states upon which he had counted. "They all talked hard," said Republican State Chairman Bill Murfin of Florida, "but the softness was there, and in the last two weeks of the campaign they just melted away."