1964 U.S. presidential election

On November 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson won a full term by defeating Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Johnson took 486 electoral votes and 61.1 percent of the popular vote, the largest share of any president since 1820. Goldwater won 52 electoral votes from his home state and five Deep South states. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota ran as Johnson's vice president, and for the first time residents of Washington, D.C., voted for president.¹

Johnson had become president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. He presented himself as Kennedy's heir and pushed the stalled Civil Rights Act through Congress in July 1964. Goldwater, a leader of the new conservative movement, wanted to roll back New Deal programs, take a harder line against the Soviet Union and leave civil rights to the states; he had voted against the Civil Rights Act. Democrats painted him as reckless with nuclear weapons, most famously in the 'Daisy' ad of a girl counting petals before a nuclear blast, which aired only once.¹²

The landslide gave Democrats huge majorities in Congress. Yet beneath the result lay a realignment: Goldwater's sweep of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina broke the Democrats' century-old hold on the Deep South, and his campaign launched a conservative movement that, through Ronald Reagan, would later win power.¹