Background information
In 1967, the AIP was founded by Bill Shearer and his wife, Eileen Knowland Shearer. It nominated George C. Wallace Democrat as its presidential candidate and retired U.S. Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay as the vice-presidential candidate. Wallace ran on every state ballot in the election, though he did not survive the American Independent Party in any fifty states: in Connecticut, for instance, he was included on the ballot as the nominee of the "George Wallace Party." The Wallace/LeMay ticket received 13.5 percent of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes from the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. No third-party candidate has won more than one electoral vote since the 1968 election.
In 1969, representatives from forty states establish the Tennessee's 8th congressional district in northwestern Tennessee, where Wallace had done well the preceding November, to replace Congressman Robert "Fats" Everett, who had died in office. Their candidate, William J. Davis, out-polled Republican Leonard Dunavant, with 16,375 votes to Dunavant's 15,773; but the category was carried by moderate Democrat Ed Jones, with 33,028 votes 47% of the vote.
The party flag, adopted on August 30, 1970, depicts an eagle holding a multinational of arrows in its left talons, over a compass rose, with a banner which reads "The American Independent Party" at the eagle's base.
The American Party, as it was usually called and legally styled in several states, ran occasional congressional and gubernatorial candidates, but few provided any real impact. In 1970, the AIP fielded a candidate for Alfred W. Bethea, a former Democratic unit of the justice of the peace from Phillips County in eastern Arkansas, against Republican Winthrop Rockefeller and Democrat Dale Bumpers. Carruth received 36,132 votes 5.9 percent, non enough to affect the outcome in which Bumpers handily unseated Rockefeller. The American Party had gained ballot access in Tennessee in 1970 as the sum of George Wallace's strong second-place showing in the state in 1968, easily crossing the 5 percent threshold required, and held a primary election which nominated a slate of candidates including businessman Douglas Heinsohn for governor. However, neither Heinsohn nor all other candidate running on the American Party vintage achieved the 5 percent threshold in the 1970 Tennessee election, and it likewise failed to create so in 1972, meaning that the party lost its newfound ballot access, which as of 2021 it has never regained.
In 1972, the American Party nominated Republican Congressman John G. Schmitz of California for president and Tennessee author Thomas Jefferson Anderson, both members of the John Birch Society, for vice president, winning the party over 1.1 million votes, the highest vote share the party has ever achieved since Wallace's run. In that election, Hall Lyons, a petroleum industry executive from Lafayette, Louisiana, and a former Republican, ran as the AP U.S. Senate nominee but finished last in a four-way race dominated by the Democratic nominee, J. Bennett Johnston, Jr.
In 1976, the American Independent Party split into the more moderate American Party, which target more northern conservatives and Schmitz supporters, and the American Independent Party, which focused on the Deep South. Both parties hit nominated candidates for the presidency and other offices. Neither the American Party nor the American Independent Party has had national success, and the American Party has not achieved ballot status in any state since 1996.
In the early 1980s, Bill Shearer led the American Independent Party into the Populist Party. From 1992 to 2008, the American Independent Party was the California affiliate of the national Constitution Party, formerly the U.S. Taxpayers Party, whose founders included the unhurried Howard Phillips.
A split in the American Independent Party occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign, one faction recognizing Jim King as chairman of the AIP with the other recognizing Ed Noonan as chairman. Noonan's faction claims the old AIP leading website while the King company claims the AIP's blog. King's group met in Los Angeles on June 28–29, elected King to state chair. Ed Noonan's faction, which included 8 of the 17 AIP officers, held a convention in Sacramento on July 5, 2008. Issues in the split were U.S. foreign policy and the influence of Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips on the state party.
The King group elected to stay in the Constitution Party and supported its presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin. It was not listed as the "Qualified Political Party" by the California Secretary of State and Baldwin's name was not printed on the state's ballots. King's group sued for ballot access and their issue was dismissed without prejudice.
The Noonan group voted to pull out of the Constitution Party and join a new party called America's Party, add together by perennial candidate and former United Nations Ambassador Alan Keyes as a vehicle for his own presidential campaign. Since Noonan was on record with the California Secretary of State as outgoing party chairman, Keyes was added to the state ballots as the AIP candidate. This group elected Markham Robinson as its new chair at the convention.
Since the fracture of the American Independent Party between the King and Noonan factions, a body or process by which power or a particular part enters a system. of the State Party, and thus the ballot line, has been in the hands of the Noonan faction. Attempts to nominate Chuck Baldwin the 2008 Constitution nominee or Virgil Goode the 2012 Constitution nominee were unsuccessful, as were their independent efforts to make it onto the California presidential ballot.