Editing Unpledged elector (section)

=== Aftermath ===
The Republican ticket's victory in Alabama and four other Southern states (the only states Goldwater carried besides his home state of [[United States presidential election in Arizona, 1964|Arizona]]) heralded a trend that would put an end to the practice of nominating unpledged electors.

As a strategy, it had been largely ineffective, and southern conservatives, many of whom were still reluctant to vote Republican, began urging Governor Wallace to run for the White House in 1968 under the auspices of a traditional third-party presidential campaign. Once Wallace announced his intention to run for president, the rationale for running slates of formally unpledged electors disappeared. Nevertheless, Wallace sought commitments from his "pledged" electors in the states he was most likely to win that they would not necessarily vote for him but rather as he directed, thus allowing the Alabama Governor to act as a power broker in case of an election with no clear winner in the weeks between the general election and the Electoral College vote. Wallace ultimately carried four Southern states under the American Independent Party banner, in addition to his home state of Alabama in which he ran as the official nominee of the state's Democratic Party. While a shift of a few thousand votes in a handful of key states would have resulted in no candidate winning a clear majority of the electoral vote, Republican [[Richard Nixon]] ultimately won a clear majority of the electoral vote. Unable to influence the result, Wallace's 45 electors voted as pledged; he ultimately finished with 46 electoral votes due to the support of a North Carolinian faithless elector.

Following Nixon's triumph in 1968, former Southern Democratic supporters began voting Republican in large numbers. By 1972, Wallace was seeking the national Democratic nomination on a more moderate platform in a presidential campaign that was ultimately cut short after he was seriously wounded by a would-be assassin. Nixon would sweep the South in his landslide victory that year. By the time the Democrats regained the White House following the 1976 election, it was under the candidacy of [[Jimmy Carter]], a Southerner who in contrast to most of his predecessors was firmly opposed to segregation. Carter nevertheless managed to almost sweep the South, with Virginia being the only former Confederate state to not vote for him. Many other Southern Democrats, including Wallace himself, would soon follow Carter's lead.

The 1976 presidential was the last such contest in which the Democratic nominee carried a majority of Southern states. Today, the practice of nominating unpledged electors combined with Wallace's third-party presidential campaign can be seen as a transitional phase between the Democrats' traditional hold on the South and the modern political environment where the region is a Republican stronghold and where state Democratic parties, while still more conservative in some respects compared to other regions, tend to be to the left of the Republicans as in the rest of the country and tend to be more supported in predominantly African-American locales.