1964 - Johnson vs. Goldwater
Johnson and Hubert Humphrey celebrate their 1964 victory with a horseback ride; Courtesy of the LBJ Library (photo by Cecil Stoughton)
Lyndon Johnson, who ascended to the Oval Office after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, is nominated by the Democrats to run for a term of his own. Candidates for the GOP nomination spend an estimated $10 million total in the run-up to the national convention — about three times as much as Democratic candidates spent during the primaries in 1960. New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller is the first candidate to use his own family fortune in an attempt to win the presidency, financing his campaign for the Republican nomination with $3 million out of his own pocket. Nevertheless, Rockefeller falls short, losing the GOP nomination to ultraconservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
Financially, Johnson and Goldwater are a curious study in contrasts. Johnson, who as a congressman had amassed large amounts of illegal campaign contributions from defense contractors, focuses on raising money from a few large donors, a departure from the conventional Democratic financial strategy. The Democrats raise $5 million by setting up President’s Clubs, whose members agree to donate $1,000. Among Johnson’s wealthy supporters is automobile executive Henry Ford II, who gives $18,000 to various Democratic committees but also manages to toss $3,000 Goldwater’s way. Less than five percent of the Democrats’ campaign war chest comes from donations of $10 or less. In contrast, Goldwater, in part because many business executives are supporting Johnson, relies more heavily than previous Republican candidates on small contributors. He sends letters asking for contributions to 10 million Americans, whose responses add $4 million to his campaign coffers.
In the end, Johnson outraises Goldwater, $17 million to $12 million. In the general election, LBJ wins by a much bigger margin, taking the popular vote by 61.1 percent to 38.5 percent and racking up 486 votes in the Electoral Collage to just 52 for Goldwater. But even in defeat, Goldwater’s mass pursuit of small contributors provides an inspiration to conservative activists. One fundraiser, Richard Viguerie, goes to the clerk’s office at the House of Representatives and, with the help of six assistants, laboriously copies by hand the names of 12,500 people who had given $50 or more to Goldwater. It is the start of a conservative direct-mail fundraising database that by 2004 will grow to 3.5 million names.
SOURCES: “The Campaign and Election of 1964,” Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia; Earl Mazo, “Politics Cost Put at $200 Million,” The New York Times, October 27, 1964; Mark Green, Selling Out: How Big Corporate Money Buys Election, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy (New York: William Morrow), 2002; “The 1964 Republican Campaign,” American Experience, PBS Online; Ronnie Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson — The Drive for Power, From the Frontier to Master of the Senate (New York: W.W. Norton), 1982; “Seventeen Gave Big Sums to Both Parties,” The New York Times, December 17, 1964; Eileen Shanahan, “Campaign Marked by Shifts in Patterns of Fund-Giving to Republicans and Democrats,” The New York Times, October 14, 1964; Jack Beatty, “The Man Behind the Movement,” The Atlantic, August 8, 2001; “1964 Presidential Election Results,” David Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections; Jon Gertner, “The Very, Very Personal Is the Political,” The New York Times, February 15, 2004.
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