 Following the speech , Nixon formally selected Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland as his running mate , who received 1119 delegate votes , with the distant second being Governor Romney with 186 . Agnew was relatively unknown nationally , and was selected due to his purported appeal to African Americans , and work for the Nixon campaign after an embarrassing experience as the head of the Draft Rockefeller movement . It was later noted that the convention had featured Nixon as the <unk> candidate with Rockefeller to his left and Reagan to his right . The same analysis applied to the general campaign , as commentators noted that Nixon would stand to the right of the still undecided Democratic nominee but would fall to the left of American Independent Party candidate George Wallace . 
