By almost any yardstick one chooses, the 1964 election was a lopsided landslide. President Lyndon Johnson, who ascended to the office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy less than a year earlier, hammered Barry Goldwater in an election that was never in any doubt.
In some ways, the victory wasn't as complete as some — for example, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan carried 49 states when they ran as incumbents, whereas Johnson carried 44.
But more than 61% of the voters cast their ballots for Johnson, and that's a figure that no one, not even Johnson's idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, has matched or exceeded.The 1964 election is the subject of Kenneth Walsh's next-to-last article in his U.S. News & World Report series on the most consequential elections in American history.
By invoking the dead president's memory, Johnson successfully sought the passage of a social agenda that exceeded what Kennedy had hoped to achieve in his lifetime, using skills from his Senate majority leader days to get a mountain of legislation passed.
The legislation wasn't well received in the South, and Johnson himself conceded that the Democrats had handed domination of the region to the Republicans for a generation or more after passing bills like the civil rights act and the voting rights act.
At least, that's what the legend tells us.
If it is mostly legendary, it had the virtue of being accurate. In the 44 years since that time, only one Democrat — Jimmy Carter of Georgia, in 1976 — has carried more than four states in the Old South.
Of course, Johnson's standing in the South (and, consequently, the Democratic Party's standing in the South) wasn't helped by Johnson's efforts to support Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.Without the landmark legislation that Johnson promoted, this year's nomination of Barack Obama might not have happened. So, in many ways, it's appropriate that Obama should be nominated not only on the 45th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech — but also the day after what would have been Johnson's 100th birthday.
For Obama's nomination is as much Johnson's legacy as it is King's.
In the four years that followed the historic landslide of 1964, Johnson's popularity declined along with the popularity of the Vietnam War. By March of 1968, Johnson had had enough and withdrew as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, leaving the war to his successor.
"His failure to honestly discuss how badly the war was going and to reveal the true costs of the conflict led to a credibility gap with voters," Walsh writes. "He also badly underestimated the determination of the enemy to win."
Johnson's administration achieved some remarkable things on the domestic side, but, as Walsh observes, "the momentum behind Johnson's programs stalled under the weight of the war's unpopularity and cost."
And, in the end, the president who wanted to be remembered for his domestic achievements (and who may yet be recognized for that part of his record) instead found waiting for him an ugly little war on the other side of the world that consumed him.
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