Barry Goldwater lost 44 states and won the next generation of conservatives

Lose the election by one of the biggest margins in American history, then call it a success. Any campaign manager hearing that pitch would call security. Yet that is more or less what happened in 1964, when Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona carried exactly six states, took about 52 electoral votes out of 538, and went home to Phoenix having been buried by Lyndon Johnson. By any ordinary standard it was a catastrophe. The pundits wrote the obituary for American conservatism, and some of them wrote it in ink.

And they were spectacularly wrong. Sixteen years later, a former actor whose most famous political act was a television speech for Goldwater was elected President and set about remaking the country in the direction Goldwater had pointed. My thesis today is simple, and I will argue it in order: Goldwater's defeat was a loss in an election and a victory in a long war of ideas, and the lesson for conservatives is that persuasion, organization and patience beat the scoreboard of any single November. But I will also give you the strongest objections, because the story has a darker side that an honest account has to face.

The book that started it

Start in 1960, four years before the campaign. Goldwater published a short book called The Conscience of a Conservative, written with the help of L. Brent Bozell Jr., a conservative writer. It sold in huge numbers for a political book, and it did something unusual: it gave ordinary Americans who felt the Republican Party offered them "me too" versions of the Democratic program a set of principles to rally around. Its core ideas were individual liberty, limits on federal power, respect for the Constitution's division of authority between the national government and the states, and a determination to defeat communism rather than merely contain it.

You can read about the book itself and why it landed with such force in A Slim Paperback From 1960 Gave Conservatives a Platform to Stand On. What I want you to notice here is the sequence. The book came first. The movement came second. The candidate came third. That order matters. A movement built on a candidate collapses when the candidate loses. A movement built on a set of ideas can survive any number of defeats.

The fight for the nomination

By 1963 and 1964 the Republican Party was in the middle of a quarrel about its own identity. On one side stood the moderates and liberals of the Northeast, whose leading figure was Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. On the other was a rising force in the South and West, and in the suburbs of the Sunbelt, that wanted a clear alternative to the New Deal and the growing federal government. The Goldwater forces built their organization from the bottom up, in precincts and county committees across the country, a story that has a lot in common with what we describe in The Republican Party org chart, from your precinct to the RNC.

The contest was real and it was bitter. Rockefeller won the Oregon primary, and Goldwater narrowly won the California primary on June 2, 1964, which turned out to be decisive. When the Republican National Convention met at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in July 1964, the delegates nominated Goldwater on the first ballot. It was a triumph of organization. A grassroots army of volunteers, a newly energized conservative press, and a feeling of having been shut out of the party's decisions for decades had come together. Writers like Phyllis Schlafly, whose book A Choice Not an Echo circulated widely that year, helped make the case that the party's leadership had too often nominated people who differed little from the other side.

At the convention Goldwater delivered an acceptance speech that included the line that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. It was a defiant sentence, and it handed his opponents their best weapon.

The vote against the Civil Rights Act

Now the hard part, and I will not dodge it. In June 1964, a month before the convention, Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act. This was the vote that defined his candidacy in the eyes of millions.

What reasons did he give? He said he opposed racial discrimination and had supported earlier civil rights legislation, including the acts of 1957 and 1960. His objection was to two parts of the 1964 bill, the title on public accommodations and the title on employment. He argued that they went beyond the powers the Constitution gives the federal government and reached into the management of private property and private business, and that the proper cure for those evils lay elsewhere. Those were constitutional arguments, and constitutional arguments are the kind conservatives are supposed to take seriously.

Here is the strongest version of the case against his position, in terms his critics would accept. One, the discrimination in question was not an abstraction. Black Americans were being turned away from restaurants, hotels and jobs across half the country, and the states had shown that they would not fix it. Two, the Constitution gives Congress power to regulate commerce among the states, and the Supreme Court later upheld the public accommodations title on that basis. Three, the moral emergency was immediate, and a principled objection to the means ended up on the side of the people who wanted the practice to continue. Four, a great majority of Republicans in the Senate, including the party's own leader, Everett Dirksen, concluded that the bill was both lawful and right, and the story of how they delivered the votes is in Everett Dirksen and the Republican votes that broke the 1964 filibuster.

I think those points have great force. The Supreme Court did uphold the law, and most conservatives today, including the many who admire Goldwater's other work, accept that the 1964 Act was right. I do not defend the vote. I record it. An honest account of Goldwater's legacy must say that his stand cost him and the party dearly among Black voters and beyond, and that it also caused many white Southern voters to see him as their champion, which was a mixed blessing of the worst sort. Both facts are part of the story.

The campaign and the Daisy ad

The general election campaign was a mismatch. Lyndon Johnson, the sitting President, had the memory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, a booming reputation as a master legislator, and a campaign willing to paint Goldwater as a danger. The most famous piece of that effort was a television commercial that aired on the evening of September 7, 1964. It showed a little girl in a field counting petals from a daisy. Her count was drowned out by a man's voice counting down to a launch, and the picture dissolved into a mushroom cloud. It ran only once as a paid ad, and it never named Goldwater. It did not have to. The message was clear: this man might start a nuclear war.

Think about how unfair that was and how effective it was. Goldwater was a veteran, a pilot and a student of defense. But he had made comments about nuclear weapons and military authority that his opponents could twist, and he had said things about extremism and about voluntary Social Security that were easy to attack. In Washington the lesson was that a candidate who gives the other side sound bites will see them used. The conservative movement learned the lesson, and it taught a generation about the importance of communications.

The result

On November 3, 1964, Johnson won with about 61 percent of the popular vote. Goldwater carried six states: his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Let me show the arithmetic of the electoral count. Arizona had 5 electoral votes, Louisiana 10, Mississippi 7, Alabama 10, Georgia 12 and South Carolina 8. Add them: 5 plus 10 is 15, plus 7 is 22, plus 10 is 32, plus 12 is 44, plus 8 is 52. Johnson received the other 486, and 486 plus 52 is 538. The country has fifty states, and 50 minus 6 is 44. That is where the headline comes from: Johnson carried 44 states and the District of Columbia.

If you stopped the story there, you would conclude that Goldwater's movement was finished. Here is why you would be wrong.

What the loss built

One. A national organization. The Goldwater campaign had recruited and trained hundreds of thousands of volunteers who knew how to knock on doors, run phone banks and raise money in small amounts from large numbers of people. That infrastructure did not disappear after the election. It became the backbone of later conservative campaigns.

Two. A candidate with a gift. On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered a half-hour nationally televised speech on behalf of Goldwater, which became known as "A Time for Choosing." It raised money, it brought a new voice to the movement, and it launched Reagan's political career. He was elected governor of California in 1966. The story of that speech is in The 1964 television speech that turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative leader.

Three. A set of ideas in the mainstream. The notion that government growth was not inevitable, that the central government should be limited by the Constitution, and that markets and families do things better than bureaucracies moved from the fringe toward the center of the party's thinking. By 1980 these ideas were the program of a winning ticket. The long story of how the movement took over the party is told in From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP.

Four. A generation of activists. Many of the men and women who worked for Goldwater went on to careers in Congress, in think tanks, in state legislatures and in the Reagan administration. The campaign was a school.

Reagan won the White House in 1980, sixteen years after the Goldwater defeat. It took a long time, and it took a lot of work, and most of the people who did the work were not famous.

The Senate career and the law he leaves us

Goldwater's story did not end in 1964. He went back to the Senate in 1969 and served until 1987. In 1974, as the Watergate crisis came to its end, he was one of the senior Republicans who went to the White House to tell President Nixon that he lacked the votes to survive in the Senate, which is a reminder that the man with the reputation for stubbornness could also say a hard truth to a President of his own party.

His most lasting legislative achievement came late in his career. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he worked with Representative Bill Nichols, a Democrat from Alabama, on the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, signed by President Reagan. The law strengthened the role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the principal military adviser and gave the combatant commanders more authority, pushing the services to work together as a joint force. It is widely regarded as one of the most important defense reforms since the National Security Act of 1947. I mention it because it shows that the man the Daisy ad portrayed as reckless spent his later years on the sober, unglamorous work of making the military function better. It also belongs to the broader argument on the right about defense, which you can see compared in Hawks, Restrainers, Realists and Nationalists on the Right, Compared.

The strongest objection to my thesis

The best objection goes like this. You are telling a feel-good story about a defeat. Goldwater's loss also contributed to a Democratic landslide in Congress in 1964, which produced the Great Society and a big expansion of federal programs, the opposite of what he wanted. Maybe the lesson is not that losing helps. Maybe it is that losing hurts, and the only reason Reagan won was that the country had changed for reasons nobody could have planned.

There is some truth in that. The 1964 congressional losses were severe, and the legislation that passed in 1965 and 1966 remade the federal government in ways many conservatives still lament. I do not claim that losing is a strategy. I claim two narrower things. First, a movement that has the ideas and the organization can recover from a defeat that would destroy a movement without them. Second, the choice is not between losing with principle and winning without it. The best outcome is winning with principle, which is what Reagan did, and that was possible because Goldwater and his army had spent the years in between building the apparatus. Reagan also did something Goldwater did not do: he spoke with a sunny optimism that made the conservative message sound like hope instead of warning.

The bottom line

• A movement built on ideas outlasts any election. If you care about limited government and constitutional principles, spend your energy on persuasion and organization, not just on the next race.
• Principle has a price, and sometimes the price is too high. Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act was defended with a constitutional argument, and the country and the Court rejected it. Hold your principles, but be ready to ask whether you have applied them correctly.
• Messaging is not an afterthought. The Daisy ad proved that a candidate who gives the other side easy material will see it used. Say what you mean, clearly, and say it with optimism.
• Learn the long game. Goldwater to Reagan took sixteen years. Local organizing, a school-board seat or a precinct post can matter as much as a national campaign.
• Read for yourself. The Conscience of a Conservative is short, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Goldwater-Nichols Act are public on Congress.gov. Judge the man by the whole record.