The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future

Do some arithmetic with me. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson carried 44 states and the District of Columbia, and Barry Goldwater carried six. Sixteen years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan carried 44 states, and Jimmy Carter carried six and the District. Same number, flipped. If you had told a Republican operative on the night of November 3, 1964 that the next Republican landslide of that size was sixteen years away and would be won by a man giving a speech for him on television, he would have asked you what you were drinking.

That is the paradox of the Goldwater campaign, and it is why I think the 1964 election is the most misunderstood in modern Republican history. The conventional story is that Goldwater was a disaster who nearly destroyed the party. The conventional story is half right. The campaign was a disaster, by any measure that counts votes. But the party that survived it, and the people who organized it, did what no establishment had done: they built a majority from a defeat. Let me show you how, in order, and let me be honest about the parts that do not flatter us.

The fight for the nomination

Start with the field. In 1964 the Republican Party was split between two wings. One was the Eastern establishment, with Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, as its standard-bearer. The other was the movement, built around the idea that the party had spent a generation offering a slightly smaller version of what the Democrats were selling. Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and a retired Air Force Reserve officer, had become its hero. The story of how that movement was assembled is in From National Review to the Sharon Statement and How the Movement Took the GOP.

Rockefeller had a serious problem, and it was personal. He had divorced and remarried in 1963, and in the culture of the early 1960s, that hurt him with many voters in his own party. Other candidates entered the race, including Margaret Chase Smith, who became the first woman whose name was placed in nomination at a major party convention, and William Scranton, the Pennsylvania governor, who joined late in an effort to stop Goldwater. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the American ambassador in Saigon, won the New Hampshire primary in March on write-in votes, though he did not campaign for it. The race stayed wide open into the spring.

California, June 1964

The decisive contest was the California primary on June 2, 1964. California awarded all of its delegates to the winner, a big prize, and the stakes were obvious to everyone. Goldwater won, narrowly, over Rockefeller. He carried the conservative Southern California suburbs in large numbers, and that was enough. It was the first great demonstration of something that would define the next two decades of American politics: the fast-growing suburban West was a conservative engine.

This is where the geography matters. Goldwater's home state, Arizona, and his campaign's strongest base in California were part of a Sun Belt that was growing quickly in population and in influence. The migration of families, defense workers and small-business owners to the region produced a new kind of Republican voter: people who valued self-reliance, distrusted distant bureaucracies, and had no memory of the old Eastern establishment. If you want to understand the rise of conservatism in the West, the 1964 California primary is the place to start. You can follow the thread into the 1960s in Governor Reagan, Sacramento and the Welfare Fight Nobody Remembers.

The Cow Palace

The Republican National Convention opened on July 13, 1964, at the Cow Palace in Daly City, just south of San Francisco. The delegates were mostly movement people. The Draft Goldwater organizers had spent more than a year capturing state conventions and filling delegations, and when the votes came, Goldwater won on the first ballot.

Then came the acceptance speech. Goldwater said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. That line, delivered to a roaring hall, was probably the most damaging sentence of the campaign. Defenders said he was making a point about moral conviction. Critics heard something else, and the Johnson campaign used it for the next four months. I will say what I think: it was a bad sentence in the wrong year, the kind of line that lights up the faithful and frightens everyone else. Politics is partly about being understood by people who do not already agree with you, and that line failed the test.

The convention also showed how raw the party's divisions were. Rockefeller was booed from the floor when he tried to speak about extremism within the party. That scene was televised and replayed endlessly. Many moderates left San Francisco feeling the party had been taken from them.

The general election

From there, the campaign went about as badly as it could. Johnson ran as the steady hand, and his campaign aired an advertisement that implied Goldwater could not be trusted with nuclear weapons. The famous ad, sometimes called the "Daisy" spot, aired only once as a paid ad, but it was replayed in news coverage for years. The charge was unfair to Goldwater's views, and yet he had given critics material by speaking carelessly on nuclear policy and on the structure of programs like Social Security.

On November 3, 1964, Johnson won with a little over 61 percent of the popular vote. In the Electoral College, the final tally was 486 to 52. Goldwater carried Arizona, his home state, and five states in the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Add the totals and you get the 538 electors of that year: 486 plus 52 equals 538.

Now we have to say something that the movement's admirers sometimes skip. Goldwater carried the Deep South because of a vote he cast that summer. On June 18 and 19, 1964, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act, and Goldwater voted no. His argument was constitutional: he supported an end to segregation and had backed earlier civil rights bills, but he believed that two sections of the new law, the one banning discrimination in public accommodations and the one on private employment, went beyond the federal government's powers and infringed on private property and state authority. You can find his reasoning, and the facts about the vote, in The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster. Many Southern voters did not care about the constitutional fine print. They saw a man who had voted against the law, and they voted for him. We should be able to say both things at once: Goldwater's stated reasons were principled, and the votes he won in the Deep South were not all won for his reasons. Honest conservatives can hold both ideas. The later argument over how the regions shifted, and why, is answered in The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows.

The speech that mattered more than the candidate

Here is the twist. A week before the election, on October 27, 1964, a former actor and General Electric spokesman named Ronald Reagan delivered a television address on behalf of the Goldwater campaign. It ran about half an hour. Reagan did not talk about Goldwater much. He talked about whether Americans still believed in governing themselves or were ready to hand more of that work to experts in Washington. It was a speech about the size and reach of the federal government, delivered in a warm voice with plain examples. People who had never been to a political event sent in money.

The speech raised a great deal of money for the campaign, and it did something more important. It introduced Reagan to the donors and activists of California. Within two years, a group of wealthy Californians had persuaded him to run for governor, and in November 1966 he won, defeating the incumbent Democrat, Pat Brown. Read the speech in full if you can. It is covered in The 1964 television speech that turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative leader. The point for now is that the loser's campaign created the winner's career.

What the campaign built

Think about what was left after the election. First, a national network of volunteers, many of them first-time participants, who had learned to canvass, raise money in small amounts and run a precinct operation. The Goldwater campaign relied on hundreds of thousands of small contributors, a different financing model from the traditional reliance on a few wealthy donors, and a direct-mail technique that conservative organizations would later refine. Second, a cadre of young people, including many from Young Americans for Freedom, who would staff campaigns and administrations for the next thirty years. Third, a set of ideas, summarized in The Conscience of a Conservative, that had been tested before the electorate and found wanting in 1964 but had also found a base. Fourth, a Western and Southern geographic foundation that Republicans would build on in every election from 1968 to 1984.

And fifth, a reputation for conviction that the party could use. People who disagreed with Goldwater, and plenty did, often admitted he said what he thought. For a public that had grown cynical, that was a remarkable asset.

The comeback, two years later

The proof that the defeat was not the end shows up in the next two elections. In the 1966 midterms, only two years after the landslide, Republicans gained dozens of seats in the House and picked up a number of governorships, and Reagan's win in California was the headline. The backlash against the Great Society's expansion, and against the unrest of the period, gave the party's candidates room to run on order, limited government and common sense. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency, assembling a coalition that took in much of the West and began to reach into the South and the working class. That later shift is told in Nixon's 1972 Landslide and the Birth of the Blue-Collar Republican.

Goldwater himself returned to the Senate in 1968 and served until 1987. In that later career he earned a reputation as a straight talker who put the country ahead of his party, and in 1986 his name went on the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which reorganized the Defense Department's command structure. Not a bad second act for a man whose obituary had been written in November 1964. That is how American politics works: the loser who stays in the fight and keeps his principles is often the one who gets the last word.

Was it worth it? The strongest objection

The case against the Goldwater nomination is not weak, and it should be stated fairly. The argument goes like this.

One, the campaign cost Republicans dozens of seats in Congress and handed Johnson a majority large enough to pass the Great Society. If a more moderate candidate had run a closer race, the argument says, the Medicare and Medicaid fights of 1965 might have gone differently.

Two, the winning formula of 1980 was a very different one. Reagan was warmer, more optimistic, more willing to compromise, and he was running against an unpopular incumbent. Goldwater had none of those advantages.

Three, nominating a candidate who cannot win is a form of self-indulgence. The purpose of a party is to win elections, not to prove a point.

All three points have weight. I concede the first, in part: the 1964 landslide produced a Congress that passed a large number of Great Society laws. I concede the second entirely: Reagan was a better messenger. But here is my answer.

1. The establishment's candidate had no better path. The party's moderates had lost in 1960 and had no program with energy behind it. A Rockefeller nomination in 1964 would have faced the same incumbent president, who had taken office after the assassination in November 1963 and who ran with a strong economy behind him. It is not obvious that anyone could have won.
2. The movement needed a test. Ideas that have never been put to the voters remain theories. 1964 showed what worked and what did not, and the Reagan campaign of 1966 and 1980 used those lessons. For that story see Barry Goldwater lost 44 states and won the next generation of conservatives.
3. A party lives on its people, not just its presidents. The activists who ran precinct operations in 1964 were still running them in 1980. Their loyalty was not a casualty of the defeat. It was a product of it.

My verdict: you can wish Goldwater had been a smoother candidate, and you can wish he had weighed his words, and you can even wish that someone else had been nominated. But you cannot erase the line from 1964 to 1980. The people who lost with Goldwater came back for Reagan, and they remembered who had stood with them. For how that coalition later grew, read The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides and the longer sweep in Seventy Years of GOP Insurgents Versus the Establishment, in Order.

The bottom line

• Goldwater lost 44 states and the District of Columbia and won six states with 52 electoral votes. By any normal measure it was a catastrophe, and an honest account says so.
• The Deep South votes he won were tied to his Senate vote against the Civil Rights Act. His reasons were constitutional, but the result was not all about constitutional reasons, and you should not pretend otherwise.
• The campaign built the machinery: small donors, volunteer networks, young activists and a Reagan speech that launched a career. Defeats can be useful if you collect the lessons.
• Choose candidates you can explain to people who disagree with you. Conviction wins loyalty; clarity wins majorities. The party that learned both won in 1980.
• If someone says conservatives learned nothing from 1964, ask them to explain 1980. The answer is people, patience and a better messenger.