George Wallace

A poll of New Jersey voters taken three weeks before the 1968 presidential election had independent George Wallace with 14% of the vote, with Richard Nixon leading Hubert Humphrey by a 43%-38% margin.  Both parties agreed that Wallace was taking more votes from the Democrats than the Republicans. 

A Gallup poll conducted outside two New Jersey auto plants had Wallace getting 73% of the vote among 500 members of the United Auto Workers Union.  "Listen, the men in the plants want to zap the Negros by voting for Wallace.  It's that simple.  And I don't see how anyone can stop them," a UAW official told the New York Times in a quote that 41 years later appears rather incredible.

On Election Day, Nixon carried New Jersey by 61,261 votes, 46%-44%.  Wallace took 9%, less than where he was polling, receiving 262,187 votes.

Only six independent candidates have hit the five percent mark in New Jersey statewide elections.  Five of the six were running for President; only Murray Sabrin, the Libertarian candidate for Governor in 1997, was running for state office.

Only two independents made it into the double-digits in New Jersey: Theodore Roosevelt finished second with 34% against Gov. Woodrow Wilson (41%) and President William Howard Taft (21%); and  Ross Perot, in his 1992 presidential campaign, won 16% in a three-way race with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.  When Perot ran again in 1996, he received 9%.  John Anderson (1980) and George Wallace (1968), clearly on opposite sides of the political spectrum when they made third party White House bids, each won 8%.

Frank Lautenberg made the White House Enemies List when he backed George McGovern for President in 1972
DENVER - A glance at the 1972 Democratic National Convention might put things in perspective for those Democrats who think the party is irreconcilably divided between Camp Hillary and Obamaland.

After liberal Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota won his party’s nomination for president that year, primary loser Alabama Gov. George Wallace refused to support him, taking southern segregationists on an embittered exodus out of the party.

U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-Cliffside Park) remembers that convention, and he recalls firmly backing McGovern.

"My support for McGovern earned me a spot on Richard Nixon’s enemies list," Lautenberg told PolitickerNJ.com.