The 1964 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania took place on November 3, 1964, and was part of the 1964 United States presidential election. Voters chose 29 representatives to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president. Pennsylvania overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic nominee, PresidentLyndon B. Johnson, over the Republican nominee, SenatorBarry Goldwater. Johnson won Pennsylvania by a margin of 30.22%. Apart from William Howard Taft in 1912 (when third-party candidates obtained substantial minorities of the vote), Goldwater's 34.7% of the vote is easily the worst showing for a Republican in the state since the party was founded.[1] Even relative to Johnson's popular vote landslide, Pennsylvania came out as 7.64% more Democratic than the nation at-large; the only occasion under the current two-party system that the state has been more anomalously Democratic than this was in Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide.[1]
During the 1960s the Republican Party was turning its attention from the declining rural Yankee counties to the growing and traditionally Democratic Catholic vote,[2] along with the conservative Sun Belt whose growth was driven by lower taxes, warm weather, and air conditioning. This growth meant that activist Republicans centered in the Sun Belt had become much more conservative than the majority of members in historic Northeastern GOP strongholds.[3]
The consequence of this was that a bitterly divided Republican Party was able to nominate the staunchly conservative SenatorBarry Goldwater of Arizona, who ran with the equally conservative Republican National Committee chair, CongressmanWilliam E. Miller of New York, for president in 1964. Goldwater was widely seen in the liberalNortheastern United States as a right-wing extremist or at least an inexperienced nominee prone to gaffes;[4] he had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Johnson campaign portrayed him as liable to provoke a nuclear war.[5] Goldwater wrote Pennsylvania off from the very beginning of his campaign.[6] Pennsylvania Republicans had generally preferred moderate GovernorWilliam Scranton for the nomination, who was unsuccessfully encouraged to run by Dwight D. Eisenhower.[7] Many Pennsylvania Republicans, such as Representative James G. Fulton, refused to endorse Goldwater.[8]
Results
1964 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania[9]
Johnson won all but four counties in Pennsylvania: the central Pennsylvania counties of Snyder and Union, which have not voted Democratic since the Civil War;[10] northeastern Wayne County, which has never voted Democratic since Grover Cleveland won it in 1892; and Lebanon County, which has only once voted Democratic since 1856 (when Franklin D. Roosevelt narrowly won it in his 1936 landslide).[11] This was the last presidential election in which Philadelphia was not the most Democratic county in Pennsylvania. This is also the only occasion since 1856 when Somerset, Lancaster, and Huntingdon counties have not voted for the Republican presidential candidate, and marked the first time since that election when suburban Delaware County had not voted Republican.[12]
↑ Nexon, David; 'Asymmetry in the Political System: Occasional Activists in the Republican and Democratic Parties, 1956-1964', The American Political Science Review, vol. 65, No. 3 (September 1971), pp. 716–730.
↑ Donaldson, Gary; Liberalism's Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1964; p. 190, ISBN1510702369.
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