Nation: THE WALLACE FACTOR

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He has no platform, no ticket mate, no realistic hope of occupying the White House. Yet there he is, running for President with the approval of perhaps a fifth or more of the electorate—no fewer than 13.5 million adult Americans. Not since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party emerged in 1912 has a third party so seriously challenged the two-party system. Not since 1825 has an election been decided by the House of Representatives, as this one possibly threatens to be. Yet, starting from the narrowest of bases, with a single stock speech and not one constructive proposal to offer a troubled nation, Alabama's George Corley Wallace has profoundly affected the context of the 1968 campaign.

Though he is clearly a sectional candidate, Wallace has won surprising support in all parts of the country. Though he appeals primarily to what he calls the "rednecks, pea pickers, peckerwoods and crackers," mostly people of modest means, he has had no trouble raking in substantial sums for campaign expenditures. And though he is almost universally derided in print and on TV, he only grows stronger, turning the scorn of the "pseudo intellectuals" to his own advantage among those who have always distrusted the press.

Four to Nine. Even "pointed-headed" newsmen, as he calls them, now concede Wallace anywhere from four to nine Southern states in November and a large, though still unpredictable, impact on the vote in much of the rest of the country. Union members in industrial areas are deserting the Democratic standard in droves, even as large numbers of suburbanites and white-collar workers, who might be expected to vote Republican, are declaring for Wallace. Something like 2,500,000 voters have signed petitions to put Wallace's name on the ballot in the 50 states.

His audiences nearly everywhere are as big as or even bigger than Richard Nixon's or Hubert Humphrey's, and usually twice as enthusiastic. Often they are downright fanatical. Even in such relatively tranquil and liberal states as Connecticut, Kansas and Washington, Wallace support is abundantly in evidence. "We have no racial issues," says Washington's Republican Representative Catherine May. "Who are these people in a liberal state who will spend a buck for a Wallace sticker?"

They are, in almost every case, the discontented, a classification that crosses ethnic, social and income barriers. Typically, outside the South anyway, they are factory workers or others in low-to middle-income brackets who are tired of being told that Negroes have equal rights. "I guess I'm what you might call a racist," explains Joe Galbraith, a millwright at Ford's Rouge complex outside Detroit. "I've lived with Negroes. I've slept with them. I've fought with them. And I've had it. These people want everything for nothing. They don't want to work."