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American Independent Wallace got 9.9 million or 13.5%.

Nixon 301 ELECTORAL votes from 32 states.
Humphrey 191 ELECTORAL votes from 13 states + DC.
Wallace 46 ELECTORAL votes from 5 states.

Even if the 46 electoral votes for Wallace were swung to Humphrey, he would only have 237, and Nixon would still have 301.

At that time, the South was still Democrat, even though Wallace took Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

VDH makes a good point that Nixon took a lot of southern states that ordinarily would have gone for Humphrey but for Wallace siphoning off dem votes to cause those states to fall into the GOP column.

So yes, Wallace likely caused Humphrey the election.

But there was no Wallace presence in 2016, not one as strong and pervasive as Wallace was in 1968.

But I think it's plausible that Wallace siphoned off enough Democratic votes in the states that Nixon won that it may have cost Humphrey a win in those states.

Same thing happened in '92 with Bush/Clinton/Perot. Perot didn't win any electoral votes himself, but he siphoned enough votes from Bush to give Clinton the win in some states.

There is no question though that because of Wallace splitting the democrat vote, Nixon won many states he otherwise would not have won. Wallace gave the election to Nixon, pure and simple. Not that the democrats didn't deserve to lose.

The comparison with 1972 is this: after 1968 the democrat party decided they had to go whole hog to the left in order to win the budding minority coalition and the youth of the New Left. The divisiveness of the 1968 convention they blamed, not on the Left, but on the old guard of the party. They thought that by becoming "inclusive" they could consolidate their base. In 1972 they changed their convention rules and seated all manner of radical nutters, creeps like Julian Bond, eg, leading to the nomination of idiot leftist George McGovern. the result was an electoral wipe-out by Nixon.

VDH is seeing the 'rats make the same mistake now, after Trump's win, as they did in '72; not by moving to the center but by careering farther to the left. This would alienate a growing body of voters who are not interested in supporting violent black clad criminals in the streets, and who will have seen that Trump is actually a pretty good commonsense guy, not the end of the world they had been warned about. the prospect then is for Trump to win in an electoral wipe out in 2020 just as Nixon did in '72.

Let us pray.