# 1964 Presidential Election The election in which [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] won the largest popular-vote share of any post-1820 American presidential election (61.1%), 486 to 52 electoral votes against Arizona Senator [[Barry Goldwater]]. The election is structurally one of the most important in modern American political history — not because of LBJ's landslide, but because of what was happening simultaneously on the Republican side. Goldwater's nomination — secured by the conservative-movement insurgency that William F. Buckley's *National Review*, [[Phyllis Schlafly]]'s *A Choice, Not an Echo*, and the [[Young Americans for Freedom]] had been building since 1955 — represented the operational birth of **movement conservatism** as the dominant Republican Party tendency. Goldwater lost the general election by an enormous margin but won the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina), in many cases for the first time a Republican had carried those states since Reconstruction. The pattern of Deep South Republican wins was the operational opening signal of the **Southern Strategy** realignment. Goldwater had voted against the **Civil Rights Act of 1964** (signed by LBJ on July 2, 1964) on constitutional-federalism grounds — a position that he claimed was not racially motivated but that operationally aligned the Republican Party with white Southern resistance to federal civil-rights enforcement. [[Strom Thurmond]] switched parties to Republican on September 16, 1964 in explicit response to LBJ's Civil Rights Act. [[Ronald Reagan]]'s nationally-televised pre-recorded speech for the Goldwater campaign — "**A Time for Choosing**" — broadcast on October 27, 1964 in the campaign's final week, introduced Reagan as a national political figure and laid the groundwork for his 1966 California gubernatorial run and his 1980 presidential victory. ## Result - **[[Lyndon B. Johnson]]** (Democrat) — 486 electoral votes, 61.1% popular (43,127,041 votes) - **Barry Goldwater** (Republican) — 52 electoral votes (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina), 38.5% popular - Total: 538 electoral votes - Turnout: 61.9% ## Right-wing significance The 1964 election is the **operational birth of the modern American conservative movement** — the institutional and ideological formation that has constituted the Republican Party's dominant tendency for the past 60 years. The pieces had been assembling since the mid-1950s (Buckley's *National Review* 1955, the John Birch Society 1958, Young Americans for Freedom 1960, the Conservative Party of New York 1962, *A Choice, Not an Echo* 1964); the Goldwater nomination and the consequent intra-Republican-Party reorganization made the movement operational at scale. Goldwater lost by 22.6 points but the *Republican Party as it had existed* — the Modern Republican accommodationist tradition of Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton — was effectively ended by his nomination. By 1968 the conservative movement controlled enough of the party machinery to deliver the Nixon nomination on a Southern-Strategy platform; by 1980 it controlled enough to deliver the presidency to Reagan. The 1964 election is also the **realignment-trigger** for the broader Southern realignment that produced the modern Republican coalition. The mechanism was specifically the Civil Rights Act of 1964: LBJ signed it knowing — and reportedly stating — that the Democratic Party had "lost the South for a generation." The Deep South votes Goldwater carried were votes against the Civil Rights Act. Thurmond's defection sealed the operational shift. The 1968 election (Wallace's third-party run, Nixon's win) and the 1972 election (Nixon's 49-state landslide) completed the realignment. The famous "**Daisy**" television ad — running for one minute exactly one time on September 7, 1964 during a Monday Night at the Movies broadcast on NBC, showing a young girl counting daisy petals followed by a nuclear-explosion countdown — is one of the canonical case studies in modern political advertising and is invoked in nearly every subsequent ad-hominem-by-implication campaign attack analysis. LBJ's broader 1964 messaging strategy painted Goldwater as an unstable extremist; the ad ratifies the broader strategy without naming Goldwater explicitly. ## Connections - [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] — Winner; landslide; Civil Rights Act of 1964 simultaneously won and lost the Democratic coalition. - [[Barry Goldwater]] — Lost; founded the modern conservative movement at the cost of the 1964 election. - [[Strom Thurmond]] — Switched parties September 1964 in response to the Civil Rights Act. - [[Ronald Reagan]] — Delivered "A Time for Choosing" for the Goldwater campaign; launched his own political career. - [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] — *National Review* editor; intellectual architect of the conservative movement that captured the 1964 nomination. - [[Party Realignment]] — The realignment trigger. - [[Southern Strategy]] — The operational mechanism through which the realignment was completed in 1968 and 1972. - [[Goldwater Nomination]] — The primary-cycle event that delivered the GOP to the movement conservatives. ---