From March 10 to June 2, 1964, voters of the Democratic Party chose its nominee for president in the 1964 United States presidential election. Incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson was selected as the nominee through a series of primary elections and caucuses culminating in the 1964 Democratic National Convention held from August 24 to August 27, 1964, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Democratic Primary Race
Johnson became president of the United States upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and the goodwill generated by the incident gave him tremendous popularity. In the 1964 presidential primaries for the Democratic Party, Johnson faced no real opposition, yet he insisted until near the time of the Democratic National Convention that he remained undecided about seeking a full term. Johnson's supporters in the sixteen primary states and Washington, D.C. thus ran write-in campaigns or had favorite son candidates run in Johnson's place.
Only two potential candidates threatened Johnson's attempts to unite the party. The first was Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who had recently come to prominence with his Stand in the Schoolhouse Door in defiance of the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama. Wallace appeared on the ballot in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland; while he lost all three primaries, he surpassed all expectations, and his performance set the stage for his 1968 third-party run. The other potential contender was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who polls showed was a heavy favorite to be Johnson's running mate. Johnson and Kennedy disliked one another intensely, and although Johnson worried he might need Kennedy to defeat a moderate Republican ticket, he ultimately announced that none of his cabinet members would be selected as his running mate.
As the 1964 nomination was considered a foregone conclusion, the primaries received little press attention outside of Wallace's entry into the race. Despite threats of an independent run in the general election, Wallace withdrew his candidacy in the summer of 1964 because of a lack of support. Johnson announced Hubert Humphrey as his vice-presidential choice at the 1964 Democratic Convention and went on to win a landslide election against Goldwater in November.
Background
The goodwill generated by the assassination of Kennedy incident gave Johnson tremendous popularity. He enjoyed strong support against the bitterly divided Republicans; polls in January 1964 showed him leading Republican challengers Barry Goldwater 75% to 20% and Nelson Rockefeller 74% to 17%. However, Wallace had received over 100,000 letters and telegrams of support, nearly half from non-southerners, following his 1963 Stand in the Schoolhouse Door in defiance of a court order to integrate the University of Alabama, and he subsequently became "Tennyson's Mordred, exposing the dark side of Camelot". He began a national speaking tour with a well-received lecture at Harvard on November 7, 1963, bringing him additional notoriety as he flirted with the idea of a national campaign. Wallace's charm and candor won over many of his critics; during a question and answer session at Harvard, a black man asserted his intention to run for president, to which Wallace smiled and responded, "Between you and me both, we might get rid of that crowd in Washington. We might even run on the same ticket." Meanwhile, Johnson forbade discussion of politics in the White House and refused to comment on whether he would run in the 1964 election, instead pursuing the late Kennedy's legislative agenda (most notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964), managing the Vietnam War, and declaring his own War on Poverty.
Despite condemnation from media outlets — in 1965, when reporter Theodore H. White published The Making of the President, 1964, he referred to Wallace as a "narrow-minded, grotesquely provincial man" — Wallace's opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which he based upon states' rights, represented what pundits and analysts began referring to as backlash, specifically white backlash. Coined in summer 1963 to refer to the possibility that white workers, when forced to compete with their black colleagues in a shrinking job market, might "lash back", backlash came to be associated with whites' ability to do so in the voting booth in the face of racial tension, as they had done with the repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act in California. A series of riots over civil rights in cities throughout the U.S., notably in Cambridge, Maryland, and the Black Power movement further heightened the tension on which Wallace was able to capitalize. Wallace's connection with the alienated workingman would later manifest itself in the concept of the so-called "silent majority".
Primaries
At the time, the transition from traditional party conventions to the modern presidential primary was still in progress, and only sixteen states and the District of Columbia held primaries for the 1964 election. Despite Johnson's very real doubts about running, his candidacy was never in question to the general public. Indeed, in several states, "unpledged delegates" was the only option on the ballot for the Democratic primary. Amid a Republican Party that struggled to find a candidate and the protests of African Americans over civil rights, the Democratic primaries received relatively scant national attention outside Wallace's entry into the race.
Although Johnson faced no real opposition for the Democratic nomination, a plan had been hatched by a number of southerners to run favorite son candidates in the general election in an attempt to send the Electoral College vote to the House of Representatives under the Twelfth Amendment. One of the two major parties would then be forced to make concessions, particularly on the issue of civil rights. This plan never materialized, but on May 5, 1964, voters in Alabama voted by a five-to-one margin for a slate of unpledged electors controlled by Wallace, which prevented Johnson's name from appearing on the ballot in the general election. A similar slate of unpledged electors appeared on the ballot alongside Johnson and Barry Goldwater, the eventual Republican nominee, in Mississippi; Goldwater won both states in the general election. Wallace's third-party run in 1968 would have a similar premise, aiming not to win but to force one of the two major parties to make concessions, and nearly succeeded in throwing the election.
The "Bobby problem"
Johnson faced pressure from some within the Democratic Party to name Robert F. Kennedy, the late President Kennedy's younger brother and the U.S. Attorney General, as his vice-presidential choice, which Johnson staffers referred to internally as the "Bobby problem". Kennedy and Johnson had disliked one another since the 1960 Democratic National Convention, where Kennedy tried to prevent Johnson from becoming his brother's running mate; moreover, Johnson wished to form his own legacy rather than being perceived as a "lame duck". Although Johnson confided to aides on several occasions that he might be forced to accept Kennedy in order to secure a victory over a moderate Republican ticket such as Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller and the popular Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Kennedy supporters attempted to force the issue by running a draft movement during the write-in New Hampshire primary. This movement gained momentum after Governor John W. King's endorsement and infuriated Johnson. Kennedy received 25,094 votes for vice president in New Hampshire, far surpassing Hubert Humphrey, the next highest name and eventual nominee.
The potential need for a Johnson–Kennedy ticket was ultimately eliminated by the Republican nomination of conservative Barry Goldwater. With Goldwater as his opponent, Johnson's choice of vice president was all but irrelevant; opinion polls had revealed that, while Kennedy was an overwhelming first choice among Democrats, any choice made less than a 2% difference in a general election that already promised to be a landslide. When attempts to ease Kennedy out of the running failed, Johnson searched for a way to eliminate him with minimal party discord, and eventually announced that none of his cabinet members would be considered for the position. Kennedy instead mounted a successful run for United States Senate in New York.
Wisconsin
Wallace had hinted at a possible run numerous times, telling one reporter, "If I ran outside the South and got 10%, it would be a victory. It would shake their eyeteeth in Washington." However, when Milwaukee publicist Lloyd Herbstreith and his wife Dolores attended a Wallace speech at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on February 19, 1964, they were reportedly so moved that they began a drive to place Wallace's name on the ballot in the April 7 primary, a relatively simple procedure requiring a qualified slate of sixty electors to represent the state's congressional districts and at-large votes. When Johnson's surrogate, Governor John W. Reynolds, was asked about the prospect of a Wallace run, he jocularly deferred all questions to Dolores Herbstreith, which gave the Herbstreiths newfound publicity and easily allowed them to beat the March 6 filing deadline. On the day of the deadline, Wallace returned to Wisconsin to announce his candidacy, the Confederate flags and "Stand Up For Alabama" slogan on his airplane were replaced with American flags and "Stand Up For America".
Reynolds continued to dismiss Wallace's candidacy, which was denounced by media outlets, clergy, trade unions such as the AFL–CIO, and even Wallace's own party. According to J. Louis Hanson, chair of the state Democratic Party, "Given the state election laws in Wisconsin, any kook—and I consider him a kook—can cause trouble. This man is being supported by extreme right-wing elements who are probably kookier than he is." In an attempt to drum up support for his own cause, Reynolds told a group of supporters at one point that it would be a catastrophe if Wallace received 100,000 votes. Wallace went on to receive 266,000 votes, or one-third of the 780,000 Democratic votes cast, and would later observe that "there must have been three catastrophes in Wisconsin."
Wallace's strong showing was due in part to his appeal to ethnic neighborhoods made up of immigrants from countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Despite initial apprehension about campaigning in these communities, Wallace biographer Stephen Lesher credits him with recognizing that they were "powerfully attracted to the message that the civil rights bill might adversely affect their jobs, their property values, the makeup of their neighborhoods, and children's schools". Others note that Wallace's anti-Communist message resonated with communities whose home countries were behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union, and a series of blunders by the Reynolds campaign added to an existing resentment of Reynolds' tax policies and a recently passed housing law. "What Reynolds and most commentators would miss," Lesher writes, was that Dolores Herbstreith, who had never participated in politics until she became the de facto Wallace campaign chair in the state, was "neither a racist nor a crazy ... less interested in race and the Communist menace than in sowing conservative seeds that began sprouting with Barry Goldwater later that year and flowered with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s."
Indiana
Wallace next appeared on the ballot in Indiana, which had a long history of Ku Klux Klan activity, against Governor Matthew E. Welsh, who was running specifically so that Wallace would not be unopposed. Welsh considered Wallace a formidable opponent and took no chances, manipulating party machinery and arranging for a photograph of himself shaking hands with President Johnson; meanwhile, the Democratic State Committee began a $75,000 advertising campaign on his behalf. Welsh stumped across the state touting his civil rights credentials and denigrating Wallace. His slogan was "Clear the way for LBJ, vote Welsh the fifth of May." He also benefited from the fact that Indiana at the time had a unique type of closed primary which technically allowed Republicans to vote for Wallace but required them to sign an affidavit that they would vote for the Democrat in the general election.