How The Landslide Defeats of Goldwater And McGovern Explain Both Parties Today, Part 1:Goldwater's Failed Strategy and How It Showed Success Four Years Later

 

 

In 1964 Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater became the Republican nominee for President, largely because of a grass roots effort by conservatives to take the party out of the hands of the moderates who'd controlled for half a century. The result was an electoral disaster as LBJ would win in November with more than 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 37 percent and 52 electoral votes respectively.

Eight years later George McGovern managed to win the Democratic nomination for President backed by a similar organization of the coalition of the New Left whose strategy in the primaries had taken the nomination out of the hands of the bosses. The results were just as disastrous: Nixon would win reelection with nearly 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 49 of 50 states while McGovern would carry just Massachusetts and DC in what was the biggest defeat a Democratic candidate had ever had in electoral history to that point.

For much of the 21^st century academics have been trying to argue that there are complicated, deep-seated explanation as to why the conservative revolution which began just four years after LBJ's landslide and dominated politics ever since took place. In truth the explanation has always been ridiculously, almost ludicrously simple if viewed a certain way and it shows the clear difference between the conservative movement and the liberal one immediately after that period.

For the Republicans they viewed the world as so many right-wingers do: purely in a matter of political power absent any true moral consideration. They saw a way to get a hold on a geographic base of electoral votes in their column and took it. Everything they have done since then has made it easier for them to win elections and it began to pay off almost immediately after doing so.

The Democrats would spend much of the time since then playing catch up, particularly in trying to win back this group of voters while trying to keep their coalition of new voters together, something that became clear after McGovern's incredible electoral defeat. They spent the rest of the 20^th century on a patchwork strategy that gave them some success, suffered a momentary loss after 2000,  found a way to recover from it and then inexplicably chose to reject that strategy in the aftermath of a single  election that they chose to tie in with the McGovern disaster that seemed a solution only in hindsight and that was never part of McGovern's original strategy to begin with.  Their embrace of that strategy was perhaps the most illogical and counterintuitive the party has made in a long history of poor decisions and its not clear if they can change course even if they were to acknowledge how much its fallen apart in the last election in particular.

If there is any hope for the Democrats to try and become a national party once Trump leaves office in 2028 they need to stop listening to the ridiculous complex arguments of an increasingly left-wing branch that views the world strictly in a moral lens and look at it from a purely political one. That involves making the kinds of detached decisions the left has made it clear it will not tolerate and trying to win back the middle that they continue to argue is too conservative for their tastes.

So in this series I'll look at why both campaigns failed, the lessons that each party took away from them and how the Republicans learned how to turn their failure into success almost immediately and the Democrats tried to learn from their failure until the losing side framed it – bizarrely – as a formula for a success.

 

One of the more interesting thing about these two diametrically opposed Senators was how much they had in common. Theodore White, describing Goldwater in Making of the President: 1964 said: "He preaches: he does not direct. He arouses emotion. He does not harness it."

So much of the Goldwater campaign was based on immense organization within young conservative groups such as the Young Republicans and little to do with Goldwater himself. So much of the campaign was done as early as 1961 with no real push from Goldwater himself, he repeatedly rejected them on their first meeting and future ones. Goldwater had no real belief he could win the Presidency at any time. The most he ever believed was that if he ran against Kennedy he might be able to come within five percent of beating him. Anything else would be a disaster for the conservative cause. By November of 1963 many believed that magic 45 percent number could be reached.

When Kennedy was assassinated Goldwater lost all heart for it. He respected Kennedy and he detested LBJ. He wanted the campaign dismantled because he had assumed – correctly – that a shattered electorate wouldn't be able to stand three different Presidents in the course of a year. When he finally decided to do so in January of 1964 he did so out of a sense of obligation to the cause more than any sense he could win.

The Goldwater campaign was based fundamentally on the issue of race. One had been one Goldwater and his followers had put forth four years earlier; one became more evident as 1964 unfolded.

Four years earlier in Chicago Goldwater had tried to persuade Richard Nixon for a more moderate platform on civil rights then ended up being part of it. The argument was basically one that Theodore White, a liberal himself put forth:

If they adopt a civil rights program only moderately more restrained then the Democrats, the South can be there's for the taking, and with the South, if it comes permanently to Republican control could come such electoral power as would make the Republicans, as they were for half a century, the majority power of the nation and the semi-permanent steward of the executive branch. Furthermore, since the Northern Negro now votes habitually for the Democratic Party by overwhelming margins, why seek to outbid the Democratic Party where they can not be outbid? Their philosophy should be considered one of trade: let us give the Northern Negro for the Democratic Party and we shall take the Old South for ourselves.

Goldwater would try to persuade Nixon of this approach and part of the reason his campaign likely failed was that he couldn't decide if he wanted Northern or Southern electoral votes more.

For Goldwater and his acolytes it was simpler. Goldwater would frame it as "Let's go hunting where the ducks are." As the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 made its way through first Congress and then the Senate, LBJ and Northern Democrats would lean as hard as possible on Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to whip Republicans to vote for it. Only seven chose not to and one of those seven was Barry Goldwater.

Whether Goldwater was racist or genuinely believed that the Civil Rights Act was constitutional overreach depends on who tells the tale. Johnson knew all too well what the consequences were when he signed it to the law. "I think we just handed the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," he said. The 1964 election was the first example.

The other hope Goldwater had was a consequence of the battle for civil rights and it was unfolding in the North. During the summer of 1964 a series of race riots began in the North in New York City, New Jersey, Chicago and Pennsylvania. In these Goldwater hoped to capitalize on a new movement in politics "backlash"

There had been signs of it even before the riots in the insurgent primary campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace, as White makes clear, "wanted to see whether racism could magnetize votes in the North as well as the South." The answer was, for a stunning number of people, it could.

In Wisconsin, Wallace got 34 percent of the vote. In Indiana, 30 percent. And in Maryland he scared the hell out of Johnson's campaign by getting 43 percent.  This vote illustrated as White put it "the fear white working class voters have for the Negro."

Goldwater hoped to utilize this tactic to win voters in the North as well as the South. But because his campaign had already isolated the majority of the Republican voters in primaries as well as the moderate leaders, because his rhetoric was so outlandish it scared so many voters (especially after they heard his acceptance speech at the Cow Palace that summer) and most importantly because LBJ was able to argue both for prosperity and equality in his campaign – while engaging in horrible negative advertising as well – Goldwater never had a chance and he knew it almost from the start.

Goldwater would only carry Arizona and five Southern States – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia. The only other states he came close to carrying were Florida (where he got 48.9 percent of the vote) and Idaho) where he got 49.1 percent. Goldwater had been humiliated everywhere.

But the fact that Goldwater had made a dent in Dixie in a way that no Republican ever had – no Republican had ever carried Georgia, not even during Reconstruction – was an ominous sign. And as White pointed out Wallace's campaign, even more than Goldwater, shows somber implications for Democratic leaders.

For years – ever since the days of FDR – the Democratic power base in the big cities has been an alliance of the workingmen in their unions, the minority ethnic community and the Negroes. Backlash implied that this power base could be dissolved at the polls if the working man were examined realistically.

It was a warning sign for those who paid attention. And Republicans paid more than Democrats.

 

There's an argument as early as 1968 the Republicans had found their winning formula and it came at the hands of Richard Nixon.

Nixon was many things – the majority of them horrible – but the one thing you couldn't say was that he didn't learn from his mistakes and those of others. In 1960 he had tried to balance Northern black votes and Southern white votes and he'd narrowly lost to JFK. So in 1968 he decided to only concentrate on Southern white votes.

After the 1960 census offered 162 electoral votes in the South.  Goldwater had managed to get 45 in 1964. The problem for Nixon was that Wallace was running as a third party candidate. So Nixon spent much of the leadup to the 1968 convention wooing Southern leaders like Strom Thurmond with a plan to try and split as much of the South with Wallace as he could going into the fall campaign.

The other part of his strategy relied on the 'backlash' movement, which was now all the bigger because of the riots that plagued the nations whether they were race riots or on college campuses in regard to the Vietnam War. The fissure in the Democratic party, first with the McCarthy candidacy and the series of events that led to the riots in Chicago, all made clear the liberal coalition that had led to a landslide for LBJ was splintered hopelessly.

Nixon's strategy involved winning as many states as he had carried in the 1960 election as possible, being able to split off votes from the South and that the blue collar voters from Northern states would defect from the Democrats and go to Nixon rather than Wallace. That strategy was based on dog whistles, lies and chicanery. But it worked because dissatisfaction over the war had pushed an enormous number of regularly Democratic voters across the country out of the party for that election and in many cases for good.

White noted just how much a change this was in his Making of the President series for 1968. In 1964 LBJ had carried 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes. Just 4 years later Hubert Humphrey would get just 42. 7 percent of the popular vote and carried out of just 14 states and 191 electoral votes.

The only reason the results appeared to be  close as they were was because Wallace carried 5 Southern states with 45 electoral votes. Nixon's electoral vote total was 302, barely enough to stop the election from going into the House of Representatives. Furthermore the Democrats maintained control of both houses of Congress, the first time in 120 years a President had been elected with both houses of Congress in control of the opposing party.  As a result many Democrats and liberals were able to engage in a kind of magical thinking that it was only history and circumstances that led to Humphrey's defeat.

But the message could not have been clearer. Combined Nixon and Wallace had gotten 57 percent of the popular vote. LBJ had gotten 43 million votes in 1964; Humphrey had got 31 million votes for years later. The liberal coalition of the Democratic Party had cracked and America had made it clear that they were moving more to the right. One could argue that Nixon was lying about having a plan to end the war in Vietnam but he sure as hell had one to win the Presidency and he maximized it.

The fact that the war kept going anyway and the protests kept going and that America was about to enter a period of economic decline might very well have given the Democrats an opening. Unfortunately for them the wrong man stepped in.

In the next article I will look at how McGovern's campaign was disastrous from start to finish and if there was a path to victory from it, it was only one seen with a bizarre hindsight marked with a ridiculous number of asterisks.