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It was more than attempted. Wallace was taken out of the campaign, so it was successful to that extent.

It was more than attempted. Wallace was taken out of the campaign, so it was successful to that extent.

His purpose was to "prove his manhood", not to take Wallace out of the campaign.

One of the more interesting "what ifs" is what the outcome of the 1972 Presidential campaign would have been had George Wallace not been shot. While Wallace had done well in Democrat primaries in Maryland and Michigan, and probably would have won most of the Southern primaries, he could never have taken the party nomination, which was won by George McGovern. Wallace had run as an independent in 1968, and might well have done so again in 1972. Richard Nixon's overwhelming victory that year was due to the defection of whites in the South and blue collar unionized workers in the Northeast and Midwest from their historical and ancestral voting patterns, as McGovern was associated with the antiwar wing of his party. In the words of a prominent Republican of the time, the Democrats had become the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion". This was the "Southern Strategy" outlined in Kevin Phillips' work, The Emerging Republican Majority.

Had Wallace not been shot, many of those voters, later termed Reagan Democrats, may well have voted for him. There was also discontent with Nixon on the right wing of the Republican Party due to his centrist and even liberal policies: wage and price controls, recognition of Red China, establishment of OSHA and the EPA, promotion of afifrmative action, etc. Ohio Congressman John Ashcroft even staged a quixotic challenge to Nixon in the Republican primaries. Some of the disaffected conservatives might have defected to Wallace as well: by 1972, unlike in 1968, Nixon had established a track record in the Oval Office. Had McGovern won as the result of an independent run by Wallace or Wallace somehow actually won the election, the history of the 1970s and beyond would have been far different.

Needless to say, Arthur Bremer's shooting of the Alabama governor changed the course of American history.