Lessons From the 1964 Republican Convention: Declaring War on the Establishment

The 1964 presidential campaign initiated several trends that carried beyond that election. The race between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater produced a significant switch in both Northern and Southern party loyalties. The results pushed Democrats to the left and created the modern conservative G.O.P. that took a significant step to the right with Goldwater. Both campaigns 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.

During his first months in the White House, Lyndon Johnson channeled the wave of emotion that swept over the nation in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. The former Senate majority leader’s legislative skills and dominant style quickly produced the 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 Republican side wasn’t against poverty but rather the liberal Republican “Eastern establishment” that had been competing with the Midwestern and Sun Belt right wing for some time. Goldwater’s plain-spoken, small-government rhetoric whipped up the conservative faithful into a frenzied state. While winning the nomination, Goldwater dispatched heavyweights such as New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton, among others. The San Francisco Republican National Convention in July 1964 thus became a harbinger for both the short team defeat of the G.O.P. and the long-term creation of a conservative modern Republican Party.