American Independent Party

The New Deal coalition assembled in 1932 by Franklin Roosevelt sustained the Democratic Party's hold on power for most of the next 36 years. Between 1932 and 1968, the Republican Party was able to elect only one President, Dwight Eisenhower, and it controlled both houses of Congress for a total of only four years. However, by 1968, fault lines within the New Deal coalition were showing obvious signs of strain.

The primary source of internal division within the Democratic Party was the issue of race relations. The New Deal coalition formed in 1932 brought together farmers, union members, Jewish and Catholic voters, and African Americans. Joining them were southern white conservatives who had been voting a straight Democratic ticket ever since the Civil War. As the African American civil rights movement grew more vocal starting in the mid-1950s, tensions between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party began to mount.

In Mississippi, African Americans were excluded from the state Democratic Party, so in 1964 they formed an alternative -- the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). When a group of 64 MFDP members was forbidden to join the Mississippi state delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention, the resulting conflict was played out before a national television audience. It was obvious that the civil rights issue had fractured the New Deal coalition. In the 1964 presidential election, five states in the Deep South -- often referred to as the "Solid South" for its reliable support of Democratic candidates -- provided Republican nominee Barry Goldwater with nearly all of his 52 electoral votes.

In 1968, convinced that they no longer had a home in a Democratic Party that supported equal rights for African Americans, many southern white voters bolted to the newly formed American Independent Party. The party nominated George Wallace as its presidential candidate. A former governor of Alabama, Wallace received national attention in 1963 after he blocked the entrance to the University of Alabama, refusing to admit two African-American students.

Running on a platform prominently advocating the cause of states' rights, Wallace received nearly 10 million popular votes and won 46 electoral college votes, carrying the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana

In 1972, George Wallace again sought the presidency, but this time he returned to the Democratic Party fold. During the campaign, he was paralyzed as a result of an assassination attempt. Although he won several state primaries, Wallace was handily defeated by the liberal George McGovern in his bid for the Democratic nomination. Wallace went on to serve two more terms as Alabama governor; ironically, the second of these was made possible by the support of black voters, whom Wallace courted after publicly renouncing his segregationist past.