On November 3, 1964, Americans went to the polls to choose between two visions of their country’s future that could hardly have been more different. When the votes were counted, incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson had won 61.1 percent of the popular vote, carrying 44 states and the District of Columbia for 486 electoral votes, defeating Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona by more than 15 million votes. It was one of the most crushing presidential victories in American history, and it remains, as of the 2024 election, the highest percentage of the popular vote ever won by any presidential candidate in United States history.
The 1964 election was shaped by forces that went far beyond the two candidates who contested it. It was held less than a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in a nation still processing grief and shock. It was a referendum on the Civil Rights Act that Johnson had signed into law just four months earlier. It was a confrontation between a Democratic Party at the peak of its post-New Deal political dominance and a Republican Party in the grip of a conservative revolution that was tearing it apart. And it was a contest in which one campaign ran what became the most famous political advertisement in American history, and the other campaign offered rhetoric so alarming that it handed its opponent an electoral gift of historic proportions.
LBJ: From Vice President to President, November 22, 1963
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, in Stonewall, Texas, the son of a farmer and state legislator. He grew up in the Texas Hill Country in modest circumstances, worked as a school teacher after graduating from Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1930, and entered politics as a congressional aide before winning election to the House of Representatives in 1937. He served in the Senate from 1949 and became the Senate Democratic Leader in 1953 and Majority Leader in 1955, establishing himself as one of the most formidable legislative operators in American history.
Johnson had sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, competing against Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, but lost the nomination to the younger and more charismatic Kennedy. He was chosen as Kennedy’s running mate in a calculation designed to secure the South and Texas for the Democratic ticket, and the Kennedy-Johnson ticket defeated Republican Vice President Richard Nixon in November 1960. Johnson served as Vice President with considerably less influence than his years as Senate Majority Leader had given him, chafing at the diminished role that the Constitution’s second office imposed.
On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Johnson was riding two cars behind Kennedy in the motorcade when shots were fired. He was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and then to Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, where he was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States at 2:38 p.m. by Federal District Judge Sarah T. Hughes, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing to his right and his wife Lady Bird Johnson to his left. The image of that oath-taking, in the crowded cabin of Air Force One, with the blood still on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit, became one of the defining photographs of the twentieth century.
In the days after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson handled the national crisis with a combination of political skill and genuine human empathy that surprised many observers who had regarded him primarily as a ruthless political operator. On November 27, he addressed a joint session of Congress, invoking Kennedy’s memory and calling for passage of the civil rights legislation that Kennedy had proposed and that had been stalled in congressional committees. “Let us continue,” Johnson said, making the murdered president’s agenda his own with three words that framed his presidency as an act of loyal continuation.
The Civil Rights Act and the Transformation of American Politics
Central to the 1964 election, and to the magnitude of Johnson’s eventual victory, was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Johnson signed into law on July 2, 1964. The legislation was the most significant civil rights measure since the Reconstruction era, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and public accommodations. It was the legislative achievement that defined Johnson’s presidency in the first year after Kennedy’s assassination, and it fundamentally restructured the political landscape of the election that followed.
Johnson understood with brutal political clarity what the Civil Rights Act would cost his party. When he signed the bill, he reportedly said privately to an aide, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” The comment proved prescient. The Solid South, which had voted Democratic in presidential elections since the end of Reconstruction, began its realignment with the 1964 election. Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds while supporting other civil rights measures, carried five deep Southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. It was the first time a Republican had won those states in the modern era.
But while Johnson was losing the Deep South over civil rights, he was winning virtually everything else, and winning it by margins that no presidential candidate before him had achieved. The Civil Rights Act was enormously popular in the North, in the West, and among African American voters, who turned out in record numbers and voted for Johnson by overwhelming margins. The law cemented the Democratic Party’s hold on the urban coalition of working-class whites, African Americans, and ethnic minorities that had been the foundation of Democratic electoral success since the New Deal. At the same time, it began the slow realignment of the white South toward the Republican Party that would reshape American politics for the following six decades.
Barry Goldwater: The Republican Revolution That Divided Its Party
The Republican candidate who ran against Johnson in 1964 was Senator Barry Morris Goldwater of Arizona, a plain-spoken, ideologically committed conservative who had been the hero of the party’s right wing since the publication of his book The Conscience of a Conservative in 1960. Goldwater believed in limited government, states’ rights, aggressive anti-communism, and the rollback of what he saw as the welfare state. He opposed the Civil Rights Act not out of sympathy for segregation, he insisted, but on the grounds that federal enforcement of non-discrimination in private businesses exceeded the constitutional authority of Congress.
The 1964 Republican National Convention, held at the Cow Palace arena in Daly City, California, from July 13 to 16, was one of the most bitter and divided in Republican history. The party’s moderates and conservatives had been in open war throughout the primary season. Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, who represented the liberal and moderate wing of the party, was loudly booed by Goldwater supporters when he came to the podium, and his speech, which directly attacked the influence of extremist organizations on the party, was greeted with screaming and shouting from the galleries. Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania attempted a last-minute challenge to Goldwater but failed to dislodge him. Goldwater was nominated on the first ballot with the selection of Republican National Committee Chairman William E. Miller of New York as his vice-presidential running mate.
Goldwater’s acceptance speech, in which he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” was celebrated by his supporters as a bold declaration of conservative principle and denounced by his opponents as an open endorsement of political extremism. Many moderate Republican officeholders, including Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, refused to campaign alongside Goldwater or to associate themselves publicly with his candidacy. This Republican fracture gave Johnson an extraordinary electoral opportunity: not only the solid Democratic coalition but also a substantial share of moderate Republican and independent voters who found Goldwater’s positions alarming.
The Britannica article on the 1964 United States presidential election provides a detailed account of both the Republican primary battles and the general election campaign, including the ideological divisions within the GOP and the electoral geography of Johnson’s landslide victory.
The Daisy Ad and the Campaign That Made History
The 1964 presidential campaign produced what became the most famous and consequential political advertisement in American history: the Daisy Ad, broadcast by the Johnson campaign on September 7, 1964. The thirty-second spot opened with a little girl standing in a field, picking petals from a daisy and counting them aloud. When she reached nine, the image froze and a male voice began counting down from ten to zero in the style of a nuclear weapons launch sequence. At zero, the image cut to the blinding flash and mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Lyndon Johnson’s voice then said: “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 advertisement ran only once as a paid broadcast, but it generated so much controversy and media coverage that it was replayed repeatedly on news programs across the country, giving it far greater exposure than its single paid airing. The message was unmistakable: electing Barry Goldwater would risk nuclear war. Goldwater had made statements about NATO commanders having authority to use tactical nuclear weapons that the Johnson campaign used to paint him as dangerously reckless with the most destructive weapons in human history. Goldwater’s campaign slogan “In your heart, you know he’s right” was countered by Democratic bumper stickers reading “In your heart, you know he might” and the sharper “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
Johnson campaigned on a platform of continuity with Kennedy’s legacy and expansion of the liberal domestic agenda he had already begun. The Great Society, the name Johnson had given to his domestic program in a speech at the University of Michigan in May 1964, promised a transformation of American life through federal investment in education, healthcare, poverty reduction, and environmental protection. Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health insurance programs for the elderly and the poor, were still proposals when Johnson ran in 1964, but they were central to his platform and to the mandate he was seeking. Johnson wanted and expected a landslide not just to win but to claim a clear popular mandate for the legislative agenda he intended to pursue.
The Democratic National Convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in late August, was the scene of a major civil rights controversy. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a largely African American organization led by figures including Fannie Lou Hamer, challenged the credentials of the all-white regular Mississippi Democratic delegation. Hamer’s testimony before the credentials committee was a searing account of the violence and intimidation faced by Black Mississippians who attempted to exercise their voting rights. Hamer’s famous declaration, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” became one of the most quoted statements of the civil rights era. Johnson, worried about the political implications of a floor fight over Mississippi, engineered a compromise that many MFDP members rejected as inadequate, but the convention ultimately nominated Johnson and his selected running mate, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, without significant disruption.
November 3, 1964: The Results That Changed America
When the polls closed on November 3, 1964, the results surpassed even the most optimistic Democratic projections. Johnson received 43,127,041 popular votes to Goldwater’s 27,175,754, a margin of more than 15 million. Johnson’s 61.1 percent of the popular vote broke the record previously held by Franklin Roosevelt’s 60.8 percent from the 1936 election and has not been surpassed by any candidate in any presidential election since.
The electoral college result was even more decisive. Johnson carried 44 states and the District of Columbia, winning 486 electoral votes. Goldwater won only six states: his home state of Arizona by a margin of just 4,559 votes, and the five Deep Southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, which voted for Goldwater primarily because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Johnson received 52 electoral votes, a humiliation for a major-party candidate that rivaled the worst defeats in presidential electoral history.
The down-ballot results reinforced the message. Democrats gained 36 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a supermajority of 295 to 140. They gained two Senate seats, extending their majority to 68 to 32. The Johnson landslide had produced what Washington observers recognized as a governing majority of historic proportions, one that would allow Johnson to pass the ambitious Great Society legislation that had been the centerpiece of his campaign.
The Wikipedia article on the 1964 United States presidential election documents the complete electoral results, the state-by-state breakdown of the vote, and the lasting electoral realignment that the 1964 election set in motion, including the beginning of the Democratic Party’s loss of the South and the Republican Party’s gradual transformation into the vehicle of Southern white conservatism.
Several historical firsts and lasts were recorded in 1964. It was the last election in which the Democratic nominee won a majority of the white vote, with 59 percent of white voters supporting Johnson. It was the last election in which a Democrat carried Vermont. It was the first presidential election in which the Democrats carried Alaska, and the first in which the Republicans carried Georgia. And it was the last time a Democratic presidential candidate won more than 400 electoral votes, a record that stands as of the 2024 election.
The Great Society, Vietnam, and Why the Landslide Didn’t Last
Johnson interpreted his extraordinary victory as a mandate for the most ambitious domestic legislative program since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the two years following his election, he signed into law Medicare and Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and dozens of other major pieces of legislation. The 89th Congress that the landslide had elected was the most productive legislative session in American history.
But the same period saw the United States’ military commitment in Vietnam deepen dramatically. Johnson had campaigned in 1964 in part by contrasting his restraint with Goldwater’s bellicosity, telling voters that he was “not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Yet four months after his landslide victory, Johnson ordered the first American combat troops to Vietnam. The number would grow to over 500,000 by 1968. The credibility gap between Johnson’s 1964 campaign statements and his Vietnam policies destroyed his political standing and led to his announcement on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek re-election.
The History.com article on LBJ’s 1964 defeat of Goldwater covers the key moments of the 1964 campaign, the electoral results of November 3, and the consequences of the landslide for both Johnson’s Great Society program and the subsequent Republican realignment that Goldwater’s candidacy had set in motion.
The 1964 election proved consequential in ways that neither Johnson nor Goldwater could have anticipated. Johnson’s landslide enabled the Great Society legislation that transformed American healthcare, education, and civil rights. But Goldwater’s campaign, despite its crushing defeat, laid the ideological and organizational foundations of the conservative movement that would eventually power Ronald Reagan’s victories in 1980 and reshape the Republican Party permanently. Barry Goldwater lost 44 states on November 3, 1964, and in doing so helped create the political conditions that would eventually produce the Republican Party’s dominance of the Sun Belt and the South for the following half-century.
