Why Isn’t This Election Like the 1964 Johnson Landslide Over Goldwater?

Extremism was crushed then. Why not now?

In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater (R, AZ) captured the Republican presidential nomination and unabashedly conducted an extremist, right-wing campaign.  He opposed civil rights legislation and New Deal social welfare programs. He implied a willingness to use nuclear weapons, saying he would give U.S. field commanders and the NATO Supreme Commander the freedom to launch them without presidential approval. 

As Goldwater famously said in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

The Johnson campaign exploited Goldwater’s extremism with what may be the most effective and chilling TV ad of all time.

If you watch the link, you’ll see a very young girl standing in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting them out one by one. Then, we hear the voice of a military commander (with a strong southern accent) doing a similar countdown that ends in a nuclear explosion which takes over the screen. The ad finishes with a voice-over, Lyndon Johnson offering a few pious words about love and peace.  Johnson is never seen. Goldwater is never mentioned.

Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater 61.1 percent to 38.5, winning 486 electoral votes to 52.

This year’s election also features a self-declared extremist. Yet today, the presidential race is a toss-up. Trump’s extremism promotes lies about immigrants eating pets and the poisoning of our blood. Trump calls Democrats the enemy within and he praises those who stormed the capital on January 6^th.  And in total violation of the history of American electioneering, he continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  A vast majority of Republicans agree with him. Goldwater and his party of 1964 look like centrists in comparison.

Given Trump’s blatant extremism, how can the election be so close? Why isn’t Harris 20 points ahead? What is so different between now and 1964?

Hillary Clinton, in 2016, provided an explanation, shared by many, that about half of all Trump voters are bigots:    

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.  (Laughter/applause)  Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.”

Voters are willing to elect Trump, the ultra-extremist, because he voices their fears about the rise of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ communities. More than anything, they and Trump want to make America white again!

If that theory is correct, we’d expect white working-class voters to be very illiberal on those issues and to have become even more so over the last several decades.  We tested that theory in Wall Street’s War on Workers, tracking 23 divisive social issues questions found in long-term voter surveys. It turns out that in 13 of the questions, the responses shifted in a more liberal direction over the years, and none of the 23 became more illiberal. Here are two stunning examples:

“Should gay or lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children?”

               Said Yes in 2000:            38.2%

               Said Yes in 2020:           76.0%

“Should legal status be granted to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes?”

               Said Yes in 2010:            32.1%

               Said Yes in 2020:           61.8%

If the deplorable argument is wanting. as our research suggests, what is a better explanation for the enormous support Trump is receiving?

A disclaimer is in order. It’s impossible to address all the factors in one short article.  But this question shouldn’t be ignored, so here goes.

Let’s start with trust in government.  In 1964, an amazing 77 percent of Americans agreed that “they trust the government to do what is right just about always/most of the time.”   In 2024 it was 22 percent.

That means the incumbent President in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, was viewed as the leader of a government that protected it’s people. Kamala Harris, as the current incumbent Vice-President, is mostly viewed as a leader of a government that is not protecting the average person. Harris is perceived as part of the establishment, the elites who have benefited during the years of runaway inequality, while Trump is perceived as its wrecking ball.

But that displeasure with government today suggests another set of explanations, including the collapse of unionization and the rise of job insecurity facing working people over the past four decades.  More than 29 percent of the total US workforce were union members in 1964. Add in their families and at last half of all Americans had close union connections.  Today, 94 percent of all private sector workers are NOT in unions.   

As a result, nearly all workers have had little or no protection against the mass layoffs that have regularly afflicted the country since the 1970s, even when the economy is prospering. During the Johnson years, the union ecosystem was so dense that Democratic politicians had no choice but to appeal to the interests of working people. They had to be the party of workers whether they liked it or not. 

But starting with Bill Clinton, unions became small enough to ignore. Appealing to and appeasing Wall Street and corporate interests became central to the Democratic Party’s path to power. They wrongly believed that workers had no place else to turn.

And white workers, in particular, fled the Democrats.  The research for my book strongly suggests that the main culprit was mass layoffs and the failure of the Democrats to address them. 

Take Mingo County, West Virginia, with a population 25,000. It had 3,300 coal mining jobs in 1996. In that year Bill Clinton received 69.7 percent of the vote.  By 2020, Mingo County had lost 3,000 of those coal mining jobs, and Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent.

Is this cherry-picking one county to make a point?  No. For Wall Street’s War on Workers, we tested all the counties in the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

Our findings showed that as the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote declined. In short, the Democrats are being blamed for failing to protect working-class people from the destruction of their jobs.  While working people may not know all the details about stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts, they know that Wall Street has been walking all over them and the Democrats have done little to stop them.   

In discussing with my colleagues why this election is so different than 1964, one noted that the problem may be that Harris didn’t have enough time to mount a full campaign. But another jumped in and said, maybe she had too much time.  Say what?

“She’s a corporate Democrat,” my colleague responded, meaning that the more Harris campaigns the more she sends that corporate-friendly signal to working-class voters. When they say she isn’t specific enough about her plans, they’re also saying she isn’t speaking directly enough to them about their issues.

The transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of the working class to the party of prosperous elites can’t be ignored or wished away. It is one reason why this election is so close and why an extremist may capture the electoral college. If Trump wins, he will surely wield his axe against government, and that is certain to negatively impact the most vulnerable among us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. My research and that of the Center for Working Class Politics show that a strong progressive populist message is very attractive to working people, especially in the Blue Wall states.

It’s a damn shame that so many Democratic politicians can’t see the writing on the wall.

(For more on the rise of hate and the failure of the Democrats to fight for working people, see Bob Kuttner’s insightful piece.)