Larry J. Sabato is university professor of politics and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, which publishes the online, free Crystal Ball politics newsletter every Thursday, and a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.

If you were to ask a sampling of analysts which post-World War II presidential elections predicted the political trends we see today, there probably wouldn’t be many votes for 1964.

It was a Democratic landslide year, with President Lyndon Baines Johnson winning 61.05 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes to Sen. Barry Goldwater’s paltry 38.47 percent and 52 votes in the Electoral College. Astoundingly, LBJ managed to capture the GOP strongholds of Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming while Goldwater posted victories in only his native Arizona (barely) and the five Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.


Yet if you look beneath the surface, you’ll see in 1964’s outcome many of the contours of today’s political map. More importantly, some of the techniques that still power our very partisan politics 50 years later had their origins in 1964’s deeply polarizing contest.

The golden anniversary of 1964’s election for the White House—which is being commemorated in our new University of Virginia Center for Politics/Community Idea Stations documentary coming to PBS—is a good time to reconsider a race that produced a significant switch in both Northern and Southern party loyalties; pushed Democrats to the left; created the modern conservative GOP that took a giant step to the right with Goldwater; made polished, vicious negative advertising the campaign tool of first resort; and showed the collective power of ideologically driven, broad-based grassroots organizers and small donors.

That’s quite a list of influential trends initiated or stimulated by a single presidential election.

All this happened despite the uncompetitive nature of the election. No one who understood politics in 1964, certainly including Barry Goldwater, expected the Republicans to prevail. Voters were still recovering from the trauma of President Kennedy’s assassination less than a year earlier, and three presidents in a year would be one too many. Moreover, in his first months in the White House, Lyndon Johnson had performed brilliantly in channeling the wave of emotion that swept over the nation in the wake of Dallas. The former Senate majority leader’s legislative skills and dominant style quickly produced the historic Civil Rights Act, a vision for a war on poverty, plus drawing-board proposals for many other expansions of the federal government’s role.

The war on the GOP side wasn’t against poverty but rather the liberal Republican “Eastern establishment” that had been competing with the Midwestern and Sunbelt right-wing for some time. Perhaps it was the inevitability of a ’64 Democratic victory that assisted conservatives in remaking the party in their own image; moderates and liberals believed, incorrectly, that the losers on the right would pay a price after November.

Meanwhile, Goldwater’s plain-spoken, small government rhetoric whipped up the conservative faithful into a frenzied state. In the course of winning the nomination, Goldwater dispatched heavyweights such as New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton, among others. He steamrolled over every obstacle party leaders had placed in his way.

Hatred of Rockefeller in particular was at a fever pitch. The wealthy two-term Empire State executive had recently divorced his first wife in an era when politicians were expected not to do that, whatever the circumstances. His quick remarriage to Happy Murphy and the birth of their son just days before the critical California primary only served to remind the GOP base of his infidelity. Rockefeller then narrowly lost California to Goldwater—sealing the former’s fate and the latter’s nomination.

At the party’s national convention that July near San Francisco, Goldwater delegates booed Rockefeller so loudly he could barely give his concession speech—which, to be fair, was full of veiled insults hurled at Goldwater-ites. These same delegates enthusiastically cheered Goldwater’s declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” one of the costliest sentences ever uttered at a convention since it confirmed many people’s fear that Goldwater was too far to the right.

The party’s heart remained with Goldwater and his take-no-prisoners philosophy through the more middle-of-the-road Nixon-Ford administrations from 1969 to 1977. A smoldering anger that Goldwater and conservatism had been torpedoed by GOP leaders paved the way for the accession of one of Goldwater’s most prominent boosters, a California actor named Ronald Reagan who gave a stirring national TV speech for Goldwater shortly before Election Day 1964. From Goldwater’s insurgency onward, the die was cast, and the GOP has never returned to a moderate platform.

Goldwater’s base was in the South and West, where his vote against the Civil Rights Act and in favor of states’ rights endeared him to a white electorate, and on the whole, Goldwater’s geographic and demographic coalition has endured within the GOP. Democrats owe a debt of gratitude to Goldwater for creating a near-consensus among African-Americans for their party. Until 1964, presidential nominees from the party of Lincoln would often receive up to a third of the black vote. Goldwater dipped to an estimated 4% among black supporters, and in the 50 years since, the most a GOP nominee could hope for was about 10% of African-American votes.

Goldwater’s intense appeal in the South produced a realignment in post-Reconstruction party loyalties, on which both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would later capitalize. Goldwater ran ahead of his national vote percentage by four points or more in 19 states. Even after a half-century, 16 of these states still comprise a good part of the core GOP vote in the Electoral College. The only three exceptions (Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia) were Southern in character back in 1964 but are much less so today because of seismic population growth and in-migration.

Similarly, 10 of the 12 states (plus D.C.) where Johnson ran better than 4% ahead of his national vote remain solidly Democratic five decades on. Northeastern states, Michigan, and Hawaii, which had all once favored liberal Republicans, turned toward the Democratic Party. The sole exceptions were Alaska, which tilted Democratic briefly when it first joined the Union in 1959, and West Virginia, long a Democratic stronghold that has moved sharply to the GOP since 2000.

Political technology in ’64 was primitive compared to today, but it’s possible to trace extensive, grassroots voter contact efforts using volunteers, as well as successful direct mail initiatives to raise big money in small amounts to Goldwater. The Republican nominee’s organization simply tapped into his followers’ intensity—an almost religious commitment to Goldwater. The GOP campaign contacted 3.4 million voters in 912 targeted counties in 46 states, with volunteers walking the neighborhoods. Goldwater’s campaign disclosed that it has raised almost one-third of his war chest from over 300,000 direct-mail contributors that gave small amounts. Gifts of $500 and above made up just 28 percent of Goldwater’s total, a remarkable achievement.

LBJ couldn’t match Goldwater in the passion category but an incumbent president had no trouble raising gobs of large donations. Johnson and his advisers knew exactly what to do with the glut of cash, although it’s not known exactly how much was raised because campaigns weren’t then required to reveal such information fully.

The Democratic wave of ’64 was augmented by a heretofore unprecedented program of slick TV spots. Television advertising had only been around for three presidential elections before 1964, and the ads in 1952, 1956, and 1960 were dominated by amateurish jingles, boring talking heads, and mild negatives—such as the 1960 JFK ad featuring President Eisenhower’s request to “give him a week” to remember how Vice President Nixon had helped him.

This soft approach changed forever in 1964, toward heavy use of attack ads. Polished Madison Avenue professionals took charge, especially on the Democratic side. The Doyle, Dane, Bernbach (DDB) ad agency, working with LBJ’s political team, devised a series of spots so brutal that by the end of the campaign, Goldwater was mainly perceived as a nuclear warmonger. The often unscripted senator contributed mightily to this damaging perception, once calling the A-bomb “merely another weapon,” mentioning that low-yield nuclear devices might be used to disrupt the supply lines feeding communist troops in South Vietnam, and joking about lobbing a bomb “into the men’s room at the Kremlin.” A mere two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. came close to nuclear annihilation, Goldwater’s remarks were widely viewed as foolish and dangerous.

Everyone recognizes the most famous political ad in television’s history, the so-called “ Daisy Spot” designed mainly by consultant Tony Schwartz for DDB. The sights and sounds of spring surrounded a beautiful little girl who was picking petals from a daisy and childishly miscounting, “…four, five, seven, six…” As the frame freezes on her face and closes in on her eye, her tiny voice is replaced by a strident military one, counting down, “ten, nine, eight…” At the stroke of “zero,” a nuclear explosion is heard and the dreaded mushroom cloud appears, as President Johnson intones off camera, “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.”

The Daisy spot was shown only once, on September 7, 1964, during NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies. It proved very controversial, but the firestorm itself was worth several million dollars in free publicity for Johnson. It was devastatingly effective not merely because it was so innately frightening and disturbing, but also because Goldwater—who was never mentioned in the ad—had set the stage for the spot. The best political advertisements, positive and negative, follow the principle of not attempting to create, but instead exploiting, moods, beliefs, and prejudices already present in the electorate.(For our forthcoming public TV documentary, we interviewed the Daisy ad girl, Monique Luiz, who is now 53 and living—somewhat ironically—in Goldwater’s Arizona. A child actor whose credits included spots for Spaghetti-O’s and Kool Pops, Luiz admits she now has some regrets about her starring political role: “I don’t want to say I’m ashamed but…it’s pretty dirty politics.” She wonders if political campaigning on TV today would be as bad without the Daisy spot precedent. She needn’t feel guilty; it would have happened without her.)

Much of the rest of the Johnson advertising package was at least as negative as the Daisy spot. In one ad, a small girl was shown licking an ice-cream cone. A young woman narrated: “Children…shouldn’t have Strontium 90 and Cesium 137…They can make you die…But now there’s a man who wants to be president of the United States and he doesn’t like [the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty]…and if he’s elected, they might start testing all over again.”

President Johnson was personally on board with this approach. When Bobby Kennedy argued for greater campaign focus on the economy, LBJ, in a July 1964 telephone conversation he taped from the White House, reminded RFK, “I don’t know, a mother’s pretty worried that her child [is] drinkin’ contaminated milk, or that maybe she’s going to have a baby…with two heads…” In a chat with Texas Gov. John Connally a couple of days later, Johnson went further: “I shudder to think what would happen if Goldwater won it…This man’s had two nervous breakdowns. He’s not a stable fellow at all.” (These alleged breakdowns occurred when Goldwater was running the family business in the late 1930s; friends said Goldwater simply exhibited strain from overworking.)

Goldwater’s opposition to President Kennedy’s 1963 Test Ban Treaty—which banned testing on land, in the atmosphere, and in outer space, but not underground—is the theme of several other ads. One striking spot flashes clips of many nuclear mushrooms in succession as countdowns are heard in English and Russian. President Kennedy’s voice is then recognized, declaring his treaty “a shaft of light through the darkness,” followed by Johnson’s visage and voice noting, without naming Goldwater directly, that “those who oppose [the treaty] curse the only light that can lead us out of darkness.” The hotline telephone rings in another spot, and the narrator declares that it “only rings in a serious crisis…Keep it in the hands of a man who’s proven himself responsible.”

Johnson’s spot campaign also condemned various Goldwater remarks about the United Nations and Social Security. Another spot claimed Goldwater’s views on Medicare were summarized by the candidate’s unflattering quip, “I have personal medical insurance; my son-in-law is an intern.” In an ad that was produced but never aired, a Ku Klux Klan leader, with a burning cross and hooded figures filling the screen, is quoted as denouncing “niggerism, Catholicism, Judaism—all the isms” and in the same breath saying, “I like Barry Goldwater; he needs our help.”

Goldwater’s proposal to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority and stop public works projects all over the country is contrasted with his sponsorship of a federal dam for his home state of Arizona. “In Barry’s book, this sort of thing is creeping socialism—except when it creeps into Arizona,” a tongue-in-cheek narrator suggests. “President Johnson is president of all the people.” There was a second ad about the Republican’s alleged flip-flopping (“When somebody tells you he’s for Barry Goldwater, you ask him which Barry Goldwater he’s for.”)

A large wooden map of the United States is pictured floating in water while a hand saw rips away the eastern states. The announcer recalls Goldwater’s words: “It might be a good idea to saw off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.”

If you think you recognize some of these themes, and even specific spots (such as the flip-flop and hotline ads), from recent campaigns, you are correct. In many ways, Johnson’s advertising strategy set the standards for decades to come.

Having disliked and mistrusted LBJ for many years, Goldwater had no hesitation in returning fire in the TV ad wars. One of his lengthy commercials linked the Johnson administration to “moral decay” as scenes of race riots, dope peddling, alcoholism, and crime appeared on the TV screen. Even before its scheduled airing, a controversy about its contents arose, and Goldwater himself decided to cancel it.

Fearing defeat though overconfidence and low turnout, the ad-makers wisely ended most all of Johnson’s spots with the tag line, “The stakes are too high for you to stay home,” and one ad was blunter: “If it should rain on November third, please get wet.” By contrast, Goldwater made a serious mistake in selecting “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” as his slogan since it subliminally underlined his critics’ charge of right-wing extremism. By the way, this was the least favorably received of five slogans pretested for Goldwater, but the candidate insisted on it anyway.

In all, approximately 10,000 spot announcements were broadcast in the nation’s top 75 media markets from Labor Day to Election Day—a small number by 21 st century standards but an eye-popping total in 1964.

Lyndon Johnson, so long shadowed by his disastrous decisions concerning the Vietnam War, is gradually being reevaluated on more favorable grounds. No president except Lincoln championed the cause of civil rights more effectively, and the explosion of domestic programs enacted at his initiative—Medicare foremost on the list—is among the most productive periods in U.S. legislative history. Johnson patterned his presidency after his hero Franklin Roosevelt’s, and at least on the home front, he came close to his goal.

Barry Goldwater has also been reevaluated by friend and foe alike, and it is undeniable the Republican changed his public image during a lengthy second political life. Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969 and served until 1987. It was Goldwater who played a key role in convincing President Nixon of his hopeless political position prior to Nixon’s resignation. As chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he made his mark on a wide range of military and foreign policies, especially during the White House years of his foremost booster, Ronald Reagan. In later years, the Arizonan further developed his libertarian side, becoming pro-choice on abortion and favoring gay rights, which naturally didn’t please some of his previous advocates.

The substance of their careers is paramount, but both Johnson and Goldwater should also be remembered for the transformation they wrought in their nation’s politics during the 1964 campaign. For better or worse, Americans live with their personal and partisan legacies in every election year and each presidential season.