Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 3, 1964, less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who won the previous presidential election. The Democratic ticket of incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Hubert Humphrey defeated the Republican ticket of Senator Barry Goldwater and Congressman William E. Miller in a landslide victory. Johnson won 61.1% of the popular vote, the highest popular vote percentage in American presidential election history since 1820.
Johnson took office on November 22, 1963, following Kennedy's assassination, and generally continued his policies, except with greater emphasis on civil rights. He easily defeated a primary challenge from segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace to win the nomination. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Johnson selected liberal Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey as his running mate. In the narrow Republican primary contest, conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater defeated liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania governor William Scranton.
Johnson championed a series of anti-poverty programs, collectively known as the Great Society, and his passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater espoused a low-tax, small-government philosophy with an aggressive foreign policy. Although he personally opposed segregation and previously supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, saying it was unconstitutional. Democrats successfully portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist; the "Daisy" television advertisement implied that he would be likely to wage a nuclear war. The Republican Party was divided between its moderate and conservative factions, with Rockefeller and other moderate party leaders refusing to campaign for Goldwater. During the campaign, the CIA was ordered to collect information on the Goldwater campaign and the Republican National Committee.
Johnson became the fourth and most recent vice president to succeed the presidency following the death of his predecessor and win a full term in his own right. After leading in all the polls during the campaign, Johnson carried 44 states and the District of Columbia, which voted for the first time in this election. Goldwater won his home state and swept the five states of the Deep South, due to the Democratic Party's strong support of civil rights and desegregation. With the exception of Louisiana voting for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, the Deep South states had never previously voted for a Republican presidential candidate since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
This was the last election in which the Democratic Party won a majority of the white vote, with 59% of white voters casting their ballot for Johnson over Goldwater. This was the last election in which the Democratic nominee carried Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, or Oklahoma, and the only election ever in which the Democrats carried Alaska. This marked the first presidential election in history in which the Democrats carried Vermont, and conversely, the first in which the Republicans carried Georgia. As of 2024, this marks the last time that a Democratic presidential candidate has won more than 400 electoral votes, as well as 40 or more states.
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson became president immediately following the assassination under the presidential succession line.
Kennedy's death triggered widespread shock and grief, while opposing candidates were put in the awkward position of running against Johnson following the assassination.
During the national period of mourning, Republican leaders called for a political moratorium, so they would not appear to be disrespectful to Kennedy or Johnson. As such, little political activities were done by the candidates of either major party until January 1964, when the primary season officially began. At the time, most political pundits saw Kennedy's assassination as leaving the nation politically unsettled.
Nominations
Democratic Party
Candidates
Until around the time of the convention, President Johnson insisted that he was undecided about seeking a second term, leading supporters in primaries to either write him in as a candidate or vote for Favorite sons. All of these "favorite sons" ultimately endorsed Johnson. This led to Johnson ultimately receiving 88.41% of the vote through his surrogates despite formally receiving only 17.8% of the vote.
The only candidate other than President Johnson to actively campaign was then-Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran in a number of northern primaries, though his candidacy was geared more towards promoting the philosophy of states' rights among a northern audience. While expecting support from delegations in the South, Wallace had "no illusions" that he was in contention for the presidency.
The Mississippi Delegation
At the national convention, the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) claimed the seats for delegates for Mississippi, not on the grounds of Party rules, but because the official Mississippi delegation had been elected by a white primary system. The national party's liberal leaders supported an even division of the seats between the two Mississippi delegations; Johnson was concerned that, while the regular Democrats of Mississippi would probably vote for Goldwater anyway, rejecting them would lose him the South. Eventually, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther, and the black civil rights leaders, including Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin, worked out a compromise: The MFDP took two seats; the regular Mississippi delegation was required to pledge to support the party ticket; and no future Democratic convention would accept a delegation chosen by a discriminatory poll. Joseph L. Rauh Jr., the MFDP's lawyer, initially refused this deal, but they eventually took their seats. Many white delegates from Mississippi and Alabama refused to sign any pledge, and left the convention; and many young civil rights workers were offended by any compromise. Johnson biographers Rowland Evans and Robert Novak claim that the MFDP fell under the influence of "black radicals" and rejected their seats. Johnson would later lose Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina in the general election.
Vice-Presidential selection
Johnson also faced trouble from Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother and the U.S. Attorney General. Kennedy and Johnson's relationship was troubled from the time Robert Kennedy was a Senate staffer. Then-Majority Leader Johnson surmised that Kennedy's hostility was the direct result of the fact that Johnson frequently recounted a story that embarrassed the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, formerly the ambassador to the United Kingdom. According to his recounting, Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt misled the ambassador, upon a return visit to the United States, to believe Roosevelt wished to meet in Washington for friendly purposes; in fact, Roosevelt planned to — and did — fire the ambassador, due to the latter's well-publicized views. The hostility between Johnson and Robert Kennedy was rendered mutual in the 1960 primaries and the 1960 Democratic National Convention, when Kennedy tried to prevent Johnson from becoming his brother's running mate.
In early 1964, despite his personal animosity for the president, Kennedy tried to force Johnson to accept him as his running mate. Johnson eliminated this threat by announcing that none of his cabinet members would be considered for second place on the Democratic ticket. Johnson also became concerned that Kennedy might use his scheduled speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention to create a groundswell of emotion among the delegates to make him Johnson's running mate; he prevented this by deliberately scheduling Kennedy's speech on the last day of the convention, after his running mate had already been chosen. Shortly after the 1964 Democratic Convention, Kennedy decided to leave Johnson's cabinet and run for the U.S. Senate in New York; he won the general election in November. Johnson chose United States Senator Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota, a liberal and civil rights activist, as his running mate.
Republican Party
Primaries
The Republican Party (GOP) was badly divided in 1964 between its conservative and moderate-liberal factions. Former vice president Richard Nixon, who had been beaten by Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, decided not to run. Nixon, a moderate with ties to both wings of the GOP, had been able to unite the factions in 1960; in his absence, the way was clear for the two factions to engage in a hard-fought campaign for the nomination. Barry Goldwater, a Senator from Arizona, was the champion of the conservatives. The conservatives had historically been based in the American Midwest, but beginning in the 1950s, they had been gaining in power in the South and West, and the core of Goldwater's support came from suburban conservative Republicans. The conservatives favored a low-tax, small federal government which supported individual rights and business interests, and opposed social welfare programs. They also supported an internationalist and interventionist foreign policy. The conservatives resented the dominance of the GOP's moderate wing, which was based in the Northeastern United States. Since 1940, the Eastern moderates had defeated conservative presidential candidates at the GOP's national conventions. The conservatives believed the Eastern Republicans were little different from liberal Democrats in their philosophy and approach to government. Goldwater's chief opponent for the Republican nomination was Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York and the long-time leader of the GOP's more moderate Rockefeller Republicans.
In 1961, a group of twenty-two conservatives, headed by Ohio Representative John M. Ashbrook, lawyer and National Review publisher William A. Rusher, and scholar F. Clifton White, met privately in Chicago to discuss the formation of a grass-roots organization to secure the nomination of a conservative as the 1964 Republican candidate. The main headquarters for the organization were established at Suite 3505 of the Chanin Building in New York City, leading members to refer to themselves as the "Suite 3505 Committee". Following the 1962 mid-term elections, they formally backed Goldwater, who notified them that he did not want to run for the presidency. In April 1963, they formed the Draft Goldwater Committee, chaired by Texas Republican Party Chairman Peter O'Donnell. The committee solidified growing conservative strength in the West and South, and began working to gain control of state parties in the Midwest from liberal Republicans. Throughout the rest of the year, speculation about a potential Goldwater candidacy grew, and grass-roots activism and efforts among conservative Republicans expanded.
Initially, Rockefeller was considered the front-runner, ahead of Goldwater. However, in 1963, two years after Rockefeller's divorce from his first wife, he was remarried to Margaretta "Happy" Murphy, who was nearly 18 years his junior and had just divorced her husband and surrendered her four children to his custody. The fact that Murphy had suddenly divorced her husband before marrying Rockefeller led to rumors that Rockefeller had been having an extra-marital affair with Margaretta. This angered many social conservatives and female voters within the GOP, many of whom called Rockefeller a "wife stealer". After his remarriage, Rockefeller's lead among Republicans lost 20 points overnight. Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, the father of future President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of future President George W. Bush, was among Rockefeller's critics on this issue: "Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state — one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for president of the United States — can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?"
In the first primary, in New Hampshire, both Rockefeller and Goldwater were considered to be the favorites, but the voters instead gave a surprising victory to write-in candidate U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. who was Nixon's running mate in 1960 and a former Massachusetts senator. He went on to win the Massachusetts and New Jersey primaries, before withdrawing his candidacy because he had finally decided he did not want the Republican nomination.
Despite his defeat in New Hampshire, Goldwater pressed on, winning the Illinois, Texas, and Indiana primaries, with little opposition, and Nebraska's primary, after a stiff challenge from a draft-Nixon movement. Goldwater also won a number of state caucuses, and gathered even more delegates. Meanwhile, Nelson Rockefeller won the West Virginia and Oregon primaries against Goldwater, and William Scranton won in his home state of Pennsylvania. Both Rockefeller and Scranton also won several state caucuses, mostly in the Northeast.
The final showdown between Goldwater and Rockefeller was in the California primary. In spite of the previous accusations regarding his marriage, Rockefeller led Goldwater in most opinion polls in California, and he appeared headed for victory when his new wife gave birth to a son, Nelson Rockefeller Jr., three days before the primary. His son's birth brought the issue of adultery front and center, and Rockefeller suddenly lost ground in the polls. Combined with Goldwater conservatives' expanded dedicated efforts and superior organizing, Goldwater won the primary by a narrow 51–48% margin, thus eliminating Rockefeller as a serious contender and all but clinching the nomination. With Rockefeller's elimination, the party's moderates and liberals turned to William Scranton, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in the hopes that he could stop Goldwater. However, as the Republican Convention began, Goldwater was seen as the heavy favorite to win the nomination. This was notable, as it signified a shift to a more conservative-leaning Republican Party.
Total popular vote
- Barry Goldwater – 2,267,079 (38.33%)
- Nelson Rockefeller – 1,304,204 (22.05%)
- Jim Rhodes – 615,754 (10.41%)
- Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. – 386,661 (6.54%)
- John W. Byrnes – 299,612 (5.07%)
- William Scranton – 245,401 (4.15%)
- Margaret Chase Smith – 227,007 (3.84%)
- Richard Nixon – 197,212 (3.33%)
- Unpledged – 173,652 (2.94%)
- Harold Stassen – 114,083 (1.93%)
- Other – 58,933 (0.99%)
- Lyndon B. Johnson (write-in) – 23,406 (0.40%)
- George W. Romney – 1,955 (0.03%)