is anyone here old enough to remember the 1964 election?

I found out that Lyndon Johnson got 61% of the vote, which is the largest % any president has got since 1820. Not only that but the democrats had a decent majority in congress and the court was in its liberal 'Warren' phase. I wasn't alive then, but I am assuming that the attitude then was that the democrats were on their way to becoming a permanent majority. How did we squander our success so badly?

That was a different era, for both parties.

:(

(and north, I suppose, but most of them seemed to be in the south during those days) went Republican to punish the democrats for supporting equal rights.

but "their issue" was civil rights...just as today's tea party people use immigration/abortion/etc as their "front" issue,. when their biggest beef is that black guy in the oval office:(

there were some states that I don't think Kennedy would have won in 1964 which would be states like Idaho Utah Wyoming Nebraska Oklahoma etc.

Rally around the VP of course. Also, Goldwater was very feared. The 61% was very high and not normal.

It was not really squandered - there was never a real liberal majority. Nixon's southern strategy simply moved the anti-civil rights faction over to the GOP. It worked for a while.

but it was in a good cause and good riddance to the bigots who switched parties.

was because white Southerners hated the Republicans because of Reconstruction. When LBJ and the Democratic Party passed laws that mandated the end of Jim Crow, the South turned, and Richard Nixon made it part of his "Southern strategy".

It's pretty much been that way ever since. The only Democratic Presidents to win Southern Electoral College votes were either candidates who were from the South, such as Carter and Clinton, or Barack Obama, who received overwhelming African-American turnout in Southern states.

I was on my second presidential election by that time and certainly agree with you. I don't recall the big victory being seen as permanent at all; there was a general sense of living in volatile times.

Civil Rights Act paved the way for Nixon's Southern Strategy.

The former alienated the left, the latter the right.

Nixon came in with a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam (that was a lie, of course; he escalated it dramatically and tragically) and he made a point of stressing "law and order," dog-whistle words for Southern bigots who were stung by the Voting Rights Act and the prospect of uppity fellow citizens emboldened at the ballot box.

Racists had been under the Democrats' big tent up until Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. LBJ correctly predicted that as a result of his signature the Democrats would lose the South for a generation. But despite his many flaws, Johnson did what was right in this case, not what was politically expedient.

Ronald Reagan threw even more red meat the racists way when he kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in tiny Philadelphia, Mississippi, a KKK stronghold and the place where three young civil rights workers were murdered. Ronnie didn't need to tell the faithful why he chose to speak there. They read him loud and clear.

racemongering was no longer acceptable and to advocate for segregation or chant the n word was now frowned upon. No one was going to get elected by supporting segregation so that is when people resorted to using code words.

Goldwater would have bombed Laos and Cambodia. Oh wait.................

My parents, both Republican, voted for Johnson out of the fear that Goldwater would push the button.

...Goldwater and Johnson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Introduction

Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it, but merely popularized it. In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

While Phillips sought to polarize ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as some legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and offices, for instance. Following the Watergate scandal, there was broad support for the Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

From 1948 to 1984 the Southern states, traditionally a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, which some critics claim was "codewords" of opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and intervention on their behalf, including passage of legislation to protect the franchise. This is in spite of any concrete appeals in opposition of civil rights in the course of supporting states' rights.

the war was a problem - by the time everyone was old enough to vote - they were the generation being drafted - I suspect that influence who they voted against

came up with the commercial with the little girl, the daisy, and the muushroom cloud. Goldwater never forgave him for that till his dying day. That commercial, complete with billboards of the little girl with the daisy, became the central them of the elction-- Goldwater was the crazy man who would start a nuclear war.

He wasn't that crazy, of course, and would probably not have gotten us in so deep in Viet Nam, but conservatism was a bad word back then, kinda like liberal is now. I remember a billboard with Goldwater's campaign slogan "In your heart, you know he's right" with "Yes, far right" printed underneath.

You think recent elections have been nasty-- I remember fistfights in the streets over that one. Civil rights, pollution, Vietnam... All of these were relatively new causes for a national election and the people were all het up on all sides of every issue.

Truth is, Goldwater made me a liberal back then, but it was really tough to reconcile Johnson's progressive domestic agenda with his expansion of Viet Nam. At least he had the stones to step down when he saw what he did.

(Old joke-- GI's in hospital with some nasty injuries and gets turned down for Purple Heart. "What happened," he's asked? "Well, I heard a VC yelling 'Lyndon Johnson son of bitch' so I yell back 'Ho Chi Min son of bitch.' While we were shaking hands, the truck hit us.")

Without the war, he would have been considered a great president, in my opinion.

The GOP went over the cliff to the right. Nominated someone way out there and got creamed. Much like the Dems did with McGovern in 72.