Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority

Introduction

Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority is the study of an effort to shift the mass politics of the United States at a potentially crucial moment in recent history. The late 1960s and early 1970s represented a period of upheaval in American society, when opportunities for political change seemed more substantial than at any time since the Great Depression. This is the story of bold political ambition in response to the perception of a great political possibility.

For a generation, Democrats had dominated national politics. This era of Democratic dominance began with the economic crisis that took hold under Herbert Hoover, a crisis that discredited the Republican Party in the eyes of many Americans. Franklin Roosevelt then mobilized an electoral majority for the Democratic Party in support of his administration’s New Deal. This majority included many of America’s less privileged people, and the Roosevelt coalition had remarkable endurance. In the years that followed, Republicans won no more than passing success in elections for the presidency and for Congress. Their moments of triumph were few and brief. In both 1946 and 1952, they took control of Congress, but in each case for two years only; Dwight Eisenhower won the two presidential elections of the 1950s but did so because of his public standing as a great leader rather than because of his Republican identity. As a political entity designed to win elections, the Republican Party was a disaster. More Americans consistently preferred the Democratic Party. Following Hoover came a generation that rarely offered Republicans anything but frustration.

Decades after Roosevelt’s defeat of Hoover in 1932, prospects at last looked brighter for the Republican Party. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, many people believed that this record of disappointment was about to change, that the country stood on the verge of a conservative realignment that would completely transform American politics. A new generation of Republican success might replace the generation of Democratic dominance. Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority looks at the reasons why these beliefs became widespread, investigating how a Republican administration responded to this perception of a truly significant political opportunity.

Richard Nixon, the figure at the center of this work, became president at this time of opportunity and developed a plan to exploit it. Because of his achievements and his failings, Nixon was one of the most important politicians of his century. Achieving national prominence not long after his election to the House of Representatives in 1946, he remained on the political stage for the rest of his life and played a key role in many of the principal events and developments of post–World War II American history. When Nixon died in 1994, Senator Robert J. Dole, a Republican from Kansas, exaggerated perhaps only slightly when he commented that the second half of the twentieth century [would] be known as the age of Nixon.¹

Nixon’s idiosyncrasies as a politician would influence his handling of what he saw as a historic opportunity for Republicans. Some of these quirks equipped him well for the task, which was to disrupt the Democratic coalition by reaching out to a larger constituency. Although as a Republican he represented the party of privilege, he harbored a sense of exclusion from privilege and instead felt a sense of identity with ordinary Americans. This identity was absolutely at odds with the dominant image of his party and represented an asset in seeking to improve its fortunes. Ray Price, a longtime aide and Nixon sympathizer, later observed to journalist Tom Wicker that "Nixon’s pretense was to be less than he was—less thoughtful, less introverted, less skeptical and analytical, less cerebral—to present himself deliberately as an Average American: patriotic, conventionally religious and responsible, gregarious, sports-loving, hardworking and hard-nosed. According to Wicker, this pretense often succeeded, investing Nixon with a remarkable appeal to American voters. But there was a darker edge to this connection between politician and people, Wicker noted; it was clouded by a condescending and contemptuous attitude toward the commonality of the American people. Nixon did not believe that the high ground was the place to succeed in politics. Among the more ubiquitous politicians of his generation, he was unarguably the most controversial. To his opponents, he was Tricky Dick" almost from the start.²

Nixon rarely strayed far from the campaign trail, where he learned lessons that he remembered when president. He started to master electoral politics when campaigning for the House in 1946 and then for the Senate in 1950. In these races, he learned the value of aggressive partisan attacks, identifying his popular opponents with damagingly unpopular policies. Nixon’s anticommunism defeated first Jerry Voorhis and then Helen Gahagan Douglas. In achieving these victories, Nixon also learned the importance of reaching out to Democratic and independent voters, an essential tactic in his home state of California, where, as in the nation as a whole at the time, Republican supporters constituted a minority within the electorate. Both of these lessons proved important when Nixon looked for a new majority as president.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Nixon was a standard-bearer for Republican candidates, further amassing political skills and frequently attracting criticism for his hard-line partisan aggression. Still, Nixon could not manage to secure election in his own right either for the presidency in 1960 or for the governorship of California in 1962. Those defeats provided a reminder of still another lesson, rather obvious to politicians, that their aim is electoral victory. In Nixon’s case, his urgent desire to secure a huge majority when facing reelection in 1972 would have two paradoxically counterproductive implications. First, to some extent, this personal goal distracted his attention from the greater partisan goal of a new majority. Second, his interest in popularity encouraged him to countenance illegality during the campaign; crimes committed in pursuit of victory eventually brought the greatest defeat of all, resignation from the presidency.

In seeking a new majority, Nixon attempted to foster an electoral realignment that would benefit conservative politics. The paradigm of realignment was widespread among scholars of this period, originating in the 1950s as an effort among political scientists to explain electoral patterns across time. Its innovator was V. O. Key Jr., and a team of researchers at the University of Michigan subsequently further developed the theory. These writers investigated and documented the remarkable stability of U.S. electoral behavior. Throughout the history of the two-party system, in any particular period, one of the two parties enjoyed a continuing advantage in winning elections and in maintaining the support of a majority within the electorate. Individuals possessed astonishing levels of loyalty to their favored parties. Once a Democrat or a Republican, people tended to retain this party identification. But from time to time, this stability was disrupted. Larger numbers of Americans suddenly reassessed their party loyalty; people changed their minds about politics. Others, previously apathetic about politics, started to vote on one side or another. What precipitated this upheaval was the arrival of some great crisis that caused two significant problems for incumbent politicians: first, they could not convince voters that they had the right answer to deal with this crisis; second, they often could not agree with each other about how to do so, bringing party disunity. A third-party or protest candidate sometimes appeared at such a moment of political instability to articulate concerns that mainstream politicians seemed to be addressing inadequately. The result was decline for the dominant party and resurgence for the minority party. This electoral transition, driven by significant new issues that divided politicians and voters alike, was a realignment.³

The most recent of these turning points took place during the 1930s. The Republicans’ fall from grace at that time was part of a realignment driven by the Great Depression. The key question facing the United States was the federal government’s level of involvement in regulating the economy and in offering the people welfare protections. A majority preferred the Democratic answer that the government should play such a role to the dominant Republican position that although some activism was necessary, it should take place on a smaller scale.

During the 1960s, arguments based on the concept of an electoral realignment edged into discussions about current electoral politics.⁴ This achievement was remarkable for an idea driven by theory and by academic investigation. The achievement resulted from the persuasiveness of the way in which the idea captured the essence of continuity and change in American politics. Still, toward the end of the Johnson administration, it was not at all necessary to read political science to understand that apparently insurmountable problems plagued the nation and caused disarray among the incumbent Democrats. The Democrats’ travails created an opportunity for the Republicans to seek the support of forgotten Americans. Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority begins by looking for the origins of this potential turning point in American politics within the changes of the 1960s. The period was one of upheaval so great that Democratic discontent had many roots, including frustration (both hawkish and dovish) with the progress of the war in Vietnam, alarm (both sympathetic and hostile) at the continuing problems of race, and dissatisfaction (both conservative and radical) with the Great Society’s socioeconomic goals.

Chapter One: The Forgotten Americans

The Republican Quest for a Majority in the 1960s

The 1960s began, as it would end, with appeals by a leading Republican for the support of forgotten Americans. In January 1961, Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and an influential conservative, issued A Statement of Proposed Republican Principles, Programs and Objectives, speaking to the forgotten and silent Americans who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving. Goldwater identified them as the voters who could restore the Republican Party to majority status.¹

As Goldwater saw it, the Republican Party should seek new support by campaigning vigorously in opposition to the dominant strand of American liberalism. While mainstream liberals did not question the basic structures of the capitalist system, they saw two significant roles for government to fulfill. First, the government should ease human problems created by the capitalist economy, primarily through programs of social insurance that helped the needy poor. Second, the government should undertake limited intervention in the economy to promote its continuing buoyancy. Democrats were the more enthusiastic advocates of government activism, but many Republicans supported a paler version of similar policies, prompted by pragmatism if not by principle.

Goldwater offered a devastating criticism of these ideas. This government activism, he insisted, dangerously attacked traditional virtues of individual enterprise and self-reliance. Such policies pandered to the demands of interest groups and did not respond to individuals’ needs. The growth of government, he maintained, fundamentally threatened freedom. Goldwater was sure that a majority of Americans agreed with him. If the Republican Party dedicated itself to the defense of individual liberty by scaling back the role of government, then the party could overwhelm the powerful Democratic coalition, which had dominated electoral politics since the time of Franklin Roosevelt.²

Goldwater spoke of potential Republican supporters as forgotten because neither party demonstrated a commitment to their laissez-faire, antigovernment conservatism; they were the key to electoral victory. Many activists within the party liked this message and gave him their enthusiastic support. In 1964 Goldwater, as the Republican nominee for the presidency, had a chance to test his ideas. He suffered a resounding defeat. His belief in a possible majority of forgotten Americans was, it seemed, an illusion.

At the end of the decade, however, Richard Nixon engaged in a similar effort to mobilize forgotten Americans in support of his presidency and the Republican Party. Most famously, in a November 1969 speech, he called them the silent majority. Elected president in the three-way 1968 race with 43.4 percent of the vote, Nixon needed to find new support to secure reelection. But Nixon had a larger goal. Like his predecessor Goldwater, Nixon believed that the Republicans could piece together an enduring majority that would take the place of the Democratic coalition.

Yet the substance of this effort differed greatly from Goldwater’s even as the rhetoric remained familiar. While Nixon continued to sound a theme of opposition to big government, he did not seek to challenge the existing emphasis on government activism. He limited his criticisms to the argument that the implementation of most programs depended too much on an unresponsive bureaucracy and that the new programs of the 1960s helped small numbers of Americans while ignoring the problems of others. Not only did Nixon leave unchanged most of the programs developed by Democrats between the 1930s and the 1960s, but he was even ready to propose new programs and to increase federal spending further. He was no Goldwaterite.

Instead, Nixon’s vision for the Republican Party rested on the assumption that in the aftermath of the great victory over Goldwater in 1964, the Johnson administration had alienated many Americans, who, by extension, were now ready to rethink their previous support for the Democrats. In short, Nixon’s idea of the forgotten American represented a reaction to the tumult of the 1960s. Under the Johnson administration, the nation faced an almost unbearable array of problems—an intractable overseas war that caused social conflict at home, a growing exasperation with the measures liberals used to pursue egalitarian goals, serious racial unrest at a moment of significant racial progress, and a widespread malaise within a society seen as plagued by increasing lawlessness and by challenges to traditional notions of morality. Nixon promised to solve these problems and saw this promise as a route to revitalizing his party’s fortunes on a more permanent basis.

When Goldwater and Nixon referred to forgotten Americans, the phrase had historical resonance. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt had pledged to help the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, a reference to people who were enduring immense hardship because of the Great Depression.³ When he became president, Roosevelt launched the New Deal, intending to rescue the economy from its crisis and to ameliorate some of the forgotten Americans’ suffering. These people then formed the basis of the electoral coalition that Roosevelt mobilized, leading in time to the generation of Democratic dominance of national politics. Both Goldwater and Nixon argued that important sections of the Democratic coalition had once again been forgotten. These groups of Americans were not at the bottom of the pyramid. They were overlooked for different reasons. In Goldwater’s eyes, most politicians had forgotten the individualistic conservatism of the American populace. By contrast, in Nixon’s view, what had been forgotten was people’s anxiety about the upheaval of the latter half of the 1960s.

GOLDWATER’S SEARCH FOR A MAJORITY

In the early 1960s, Goldwater’s vision for a Republican future won powerful support within the party. Goldwater won the party’s nomination for the presidency thanks to a remarkable surge of grassroots enthusiasm and organization for the conservative cause, further aided by the relative weakness of the opposing candidates he faced. This activity reflected many conservatives’ agreement with Goldwater’s identification of forgotten Americans whose needs were unanswered by government. To gain public support, wrote historian Mary Brennan, many on the right believed that all they had to do was deliver their message to the American people. Among them was a former Hollywood actor who had become a spokesman for General Electric. During Nixon’s unsuccessful 1960 campaign against John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan—convinced that America is economically conservative—wrote to the Republican candidate with some advice about how to mobilize support: "I don’t pose as an infallible pundit, but I have a strong feeling that the twenty million non voters in this country just might be conservatives who have cynically concluded the two parties offer no choice between them where fiscal stability is concerned. But Nixon in 1960 failed to take the advice of conservatives, a decision about which he had no regrets. In a postelection meeting at the White House, he argued that the conservative approach was disastrously wrongheaded. The Vice President commented, noted Bryce Harlow, an aide to Eisenhower and later to Nixon, that anyone within the Party who is a cold-blooded analyst would have to say that the Goldwater view, had it been adopted in the campaign, would have lost by seven or eight million votes."⁴

After 1960, moderation lost to Goldwaterite conservatism. Goldwater’s message mobilized a constituency that counted in the contest for the Republican nomination. The explanation for Goldwater’s convention strength, observed sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, is to be found in the fact that the Republican Party is run largely by men who are active because of a very conservative ideology and who can afford the time for politics. Outnumbering within activist ranks the urban professionals and executives who often preferred a more moderate form of Republicanism, these conservatives had a special commitment to laissez-faire economics—car dealers, real estate agents, lawyers in small or medium-sized practices, and owners of small businesses. As Nixon noted in 1960, the pursuit of conservative conviction indeed had dangers. Faith in the existence of a conservative majority seemed to be based on illusive instinct rather than political calculation. Even rank-and-file Republicans had serious doubts about the way forward offered by Goldwater. Shortly before the convention that nominated Goldwater, a survey found that 60 percent of Republican voters supported William Scranton, the moderate governor of Pennsylvania and presidential aspirant, and only 34 percent preferred the Arizonan.⁵ Such figures were hardly encouraging. To succeed, a Republican presidential candidate needed not only to secure the votes of most Americans who identified with his party but also to reach out to a sizable number of Democratic supporters and to many independents, or loyal supporters of neither party. If, having tapped the enthusiasm of many activists, Goldwater could not even secure enthusiastic support among voters who usually supported Republicans, his ability to find a majority came into question.

Nevertheless, Goldwater and his supporters remained convinced of the existence of a hidden majority in favor of conservatism. The way to find it, they thought, was twofold. First, as Reagan suggested to Nixon in 1960, Republicans should articulate with absolute clarity a commitment to conservative principles rather than blurring differences with the Democrats. The argument assumed that voters stayed home because me-tooist Republicans running for the presidency failed to enthuse and mobilize potential supporters. The conservative strategy intended to offer the electorate a choice, not an echo, according to the phrase popularized by Phyllis Schlafly in her book explaining the approach. Second, Goldwaterites thought that the South offered an especially promising source of votes. The South’s solid support for the Democratic Party represented an ideological aberration. Despite widespread conservatism in the region, hostility to Republicans remained the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The conservatives sought to persuade white southerners at last to overcome this hostility; national Democrats’ increasing commitment to the cause of civil rights created a propitious moment in which Republicans could make their case. They calculated that the addition of the South to existing areas of party strength would create a sound majority within the Electoral College.⁶

Despite his confidence in the fundamental conservatism of the American people, Goldwater sensed that 1964 was not a promising time to mobilize this majority. The nation was prosperous and the president popular; Goldwater doubted that Americans wanted a further change of leader in the aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination.⁷ Nevertheless, Goldwater did not compromise his conservative mission. His acceptance speech emphasized his rejection of compromise: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. During the campaign, Goldwater’s conservative mission included four distinctive components. First, he attacked activist government and advocated fiscal conservatism. As his book The Conscience of a Conservative indicated, this was the most important element of his politics. Second, within the contemporary context of the struggle for civil rights, his stress on states’ rights had the important implication that, under Goldwater, the federal government would not challenge practices of racial inequality. Third, his foreign policy emphasized strident anticommunism and an urgent requirement for a strong defense to protect all American interests. Fourth, he raised a set of concerns about ills within American society, most notably crime and what became known as permissiveness.

The contrast with Lyndon Johnson was sharp. At the center of his new administration, Johnson placed his goal of a Great Society, announced at the University of Michigan in May 1964. We stand at the edge of the greatest era in the life of any nation, he said in Detroit the following month. For the first time in world history, we have the abundance and the ability to free every man from hopeless want. By the fall, as the elections approached, a set of task forces was hard at work creating the legislation necessary to achieve this breathtakingly ambitious goal. Moreover, significant action as well as rhetoric was already occurring. First, in response to the campaign for legal equality for African Americans, Johnson worked strenuously to persuade Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Second, Johnson requested and Congress delivered the Economic Opportunity Act, a multifaceted initiative that created ten antipoverty programs.⁸

Goldwater’s rejection of activist government constituted a serious misunderstanding of the contemporary mood. While many Americans in fact possessed a conservative impulse, it often coexisted with liberal beliefs. According to a fall 1964 survey of public opinion, a majority of the American electorate was indeed ideologically conservative. The majority of Americans favored the principles of limited government and individual self-reliance. But at the same time, most people were operationally liberal, strongly supporting specific examples of governmental programmatic activism. For example, more than three-quarters of respondents agreed with the abstract statement that the poor were at least partly to blame for their predicament, but many respondents also agreed with the specific statement that the government had a role in trying to reduce unemployment and poverty. Traditional beliefs regarding individualism remained strong, while support for government activism, in place since the Great Depression, had also gained force. On the one hand, the strength of ideological conservatism explains the confidence of Goldwater and his supporters that they could win the allegiance of many voters. In some senses, many Americans were indeed conservative. On the other hand, the strength of operational liberalism exposes the misguided nature of that confidence. As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was able to ride high, wide, and handsome, wrote public opinion analysts Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril. But the moment he was forced to discuss issues and programs, he was finished.⁹

Race was not an important element of the Goldwater philosophy, but issues of civil rights formed a vital part of the American scene at the time of his candidacy. Treating them in the same way as other examples of federal government activism, Goldwater applied his antigovernment philosophy in response to civil rights issues. Although he did not hold racist beliefs, he did not believe that the federal government should have a significant role in race relations. Because of his dedication to the concept of states’ rights, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After rioting occurred in a number of cities later that summer, Goldwater met with Johnson and offered to mute discussion of their differences on this inflammatory topic; Johnson readily agreed.¹⁰

Even though there was little direct debate about civil rights, the disagreement between the candidates was clear. The Republican platform supported the Civil Rights Act, but the party’s overall approach to civil rights was lukewarm. The party endorsed the ideal of equality without making a commitment to use governmental powers in its pursuit. The contrast between this approach and that of the Democratic Party—a dedication to use the federal government to eradicate formal inequalities—was stark. The development of this partisan difference was new. Just four years earlier, in 1960, there had been barely any difference between the parties’ civil rights positions as revealed by their platforms. According to political scientists Edward Carmines and James Stimson, the presidential election of 1964 marked the decisive turning point in the political evolution of racial issues. The Democratic Party was becoming the party of racial liberalism, while the Republican Party was becoming the party of opposition to racial liberalism.¹¹

On the Cold War, Goldwater developed a distinctive line, characterized by ardent anticommunism, in contrast with Johnson’s more conciliatory approach. If Communism intends to bury us, Goldwater said during the campaign, let us tell the Communists loud and clear we’re not going to hand them the shovel. In retrospect, the most important matter of foreign policy was America’s growing commitment to protect the South Vietnamese government against communism. This commitment, affirmed in the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, enjoyed support of a nature so consensual that it was an issue of little controversy. As with civil rights, Goldwater privately offered to withhold any criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policy. In fact, the candidates raised the issue from time to time, but it played a minor role in the campaign.¹²

More significant was the general impact of Goldwater’s campaign against Johnson’s foreign policy of drift, deception and defeat. Goldwater’s uncompromising and sometimes careless rhetoric created an image of a trigger-happy candidate—sanguine, even, about the prospect of using nuclear weaponry. The Johnson campaign encouraged this perception, most notably in a controversial set of television commercials. Public opinion polls during this period often revealed that although Democrats enjoyed a better reputation as custodians of the economy, Republicans were considered somewhat more successful at running the nation’s foreign policy. But the Goldwater candidacy seriously damaged this reputation as the party of peace.¹³

Goldwater’s appeal to the electorate did not include only a hawkish approach to the Cold War and a conservative critique of the New Deal tradition of government activism. He also discussed a new set of issues relating to personal morality and its public manifestations. Goldwater had only recently started to speak about this subject: until the early 1960s, he had barely strayed from his anticommunist, antigovernment, and economically traditionalist message. Responding to a climate in which numerous changes were occurring and in which those changes were prompting anxieties—perhaps, for the moment, concentrated within the conservative constituency—Goldwater added a new dimension to this message. In 1963, for example, he cosponsored a constitutional amendment that would end the Supreme Court’s ban on prayer in public schools.¹⁴

When he received the Republican nomination, Goldwater spoke out about the moral decline and drift in the United States. On opening his campaign, he cited the sick joke, the slick slogan, the off-color drama, and the pornographic book as evidence of this crisis. He also emphasized the problem of rising crime; women did not feel safe in the streets, he said. During the fall, because of the apparent ineffectiveness of his rhetoric about foreign policy and the economy, Goldwater tended increasingly to stress these issues. In the candidate’s view, the problems were the product of a failure of leadership; concretely, he sought to remind voters of Lyndon Johnson’s accumulation of a private fortune while in public service and of ethical lapses among the president’s close associates.¹⁵

References to the ethics of Johnson and his circle were included in a campaign film that intended to make the Republican case on the subject of moral decline. Sponsored by Mothers for a Moral America and originally to be introduced by John Wayne, who was famous for his good-guy roles in Western movies, Choice linked ethical questions with other crises of morality. The film depicted urban unrest, drug abuse, crime, and pornography and suggested that all would plague America under the Democrats. Together with his campaign team, however, Goldwater decided that that the film would generate an unfavorable reaction, and the piece was not broadcast.¹⁶ The incident vividly demonstrates the ways in which the Goldwater campaign was attempting to develop different themes to reach American voters as well as the existence of a certain caution about the wisdom of engaging in this politics of morality.

Altogether, Goldwater failed as a national candidate. He secured only 38.5 percent of the popular vote, and Johnson secured one of the greatest landslide victories in American history. Goldwater did, however, succeed as a candidate in the Deep South, largely as a result of the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights. Soon after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson had remarked to an aide, I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine. An organizer of the racist Citizens’ Council movement later made a similar point: We took four states for Goldwater in 1964, and hell, we didn’t even like him. He voted against the Civil Rights Act, and we just showed our appreciation.¹⁷

In the short run, the partisan polarization over civil rights had a great impact. The only states won by Goldwater—in addition to his home state of Arizona—were five in the Deep South; all had been dependably anti-Republican since Reconstruction. Across the South as a whole, Goldwater secured 55 percent of the white vote. Overall, black Americans voted decisively for Johnson; rather less than 10 percent voted for Goldwater, while about a third had chosen Nixon just four years previously. The losses suffered by the Democratic Party within the nation’s white majority were smaller than Johnson had feared, however. During the primary season, George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, had found a surprising amount of support in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, especially in ethnic neighborhoods there. But this support for Wallace among northern Democrats did not become support for Goldwater in the general election.¹⁸

In the longer run, the results of 1964 did not necessarily determine that the parties would remain polarized in this way. The Republican Party might remember its heritage as the party of Lincoln and renew its commitment to racial equality. Such a development had become less likely, however. While the activists and officeholders of the Democratic Party increasingly supported governmental action on racial matters, their Republican counterparts were increasingly characterized by skepticism about such policies.¹⁹

Reasons other than the content of Goldwater’s message may account for the scale of his defeat. Goldwater often clumsily explained his proposals, and he made mistakes in the conduct of his campaign against Johnson. Moreover, from the start Goldwater faced a difficult task in challenging a popular and successful incumbent.²⁰ Nevertheless, the basic reason for Goldwater’s defeat is more simple. The forgotten Americans did not exist in numbers nearly great enough to bring victory. The political ideas that Goldwater espoused were the choice of a minority, not a majority.

The landslide defeat left the Republicans in some disarray, and an immediate effort to rebuild the party followed. Dean Burch, Goldwater’s appointee as national chairman, lost the post. Burch’s successor, Ray Bliss, began work on plans to improve the party’s organization, downplaying ideology and emphasizing the reconciliation of differences among Republicans. Leading Republicans met as the Republican Coordinating Committee to heal the damage caused by Goldwater’s disastrous candidacy. While the party’s electoral problems in 1964 caused reassessments of policy, strategy, and party organization at the elite level, they did not shake the conservatives’ grassroots influence. In many areas, the lower levels of the party remained dominated by the activists who had been most enthusiastic about Goldwater and his brand of conservatism. Future presidential aspirants would need to recognize these people’s importance and to cultivate their support.²¹

CHANGE

The Goldwater candidacy deepened the Republican disadvantage within the electorate. In place since the New Deal, the disadvantage had grown since World War II and grew still more in response to the Democratic buoyancy linked with the Johnson landslide. According to Gallup polls, the number of American voters who identified themselves as Republicans declined by 5 points to 25 percent between 1960 and 1964, while in the same period Democratic identifiers increased by 6 points to 53 percent; the remaining slice of the electorate was independent of partisan identification. These discouraging statistics concealed one small advantage for the Republican Party: its supporters were more likely to turn out to vote than Democratic supporters were. Nevertheless, in a normal election, the Republicans could expect to receive only a minority of the vote, and the party’s minority status was gradually becoming more rather than less pronounced. [T]he GOP, wrote political scientist Walter Dean Burnham in early 1965, is becoming less and less relevant to the central issues and concerns of American politics in the last half of the century.²²

But even as the Democratic Party achieved the pinnacle of success, its easy dominance of American politics was about to face new challenges and its strong base of support was about to experience erosion and fragmentation. Following the Johnson landslide, the sources of change were many. First, civil rights achievements followed by further urban riots intensified America’s racial agonies. Second, the war in Vietnam was a disaster for Johnson’s reputation as president and tore apart a Cold War consensus about the appropriate U.S. role in global affairs. Third, the New Deal tradition of programmatic liberalism reached fresh heights of achievement within the Great Society, but in so doing, liberalism became more controversial. Fourth, the nation faced new manifestations of the moral decline about which Goldwater had spoken during the 1964 campaign.

Indeed, a shock to the American political system took place very soon after Johnson’s inauguration. Support for the parties declined suddenly as many Americans became less willing to embrace either the Republicans or the Democrats, preferring instead to remain partisan independents. Although both parties suffered from the decline, its impact was a little greater on the Democratic Party, which had recently enjoyed a new boost of support. An analysis of survey data by Philip Converse offered a precise timing of the change: it took place between June and October 1965. During that time, there was a noticeably sharp break in the national support for the Democratic Party. The break is not explained by public reactions to the Vietnam War, because, although this was the period when the administration escalated the war, most