United States Senate election in Arizona, 1952

United States Senate election in Arizona, 1952
Turnout	82.28% (registered voters) [1]
McFarland—50-60% McFarland—60-70% McFarland—70-80%	Goldwater—50-60%
U.S. Senator before election; Ernest McFarland ; Democratic	Elected U.S. Senator; Barry Goldwater ; Republican

Last updated April 01, 2019

The 1952 United States Senate election in Arizona was held on November 4, 1952. Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland ran for re-election to a third term, but was defeated by the Republican nominee and future candidate for President of the United States, Barry Goldwater.^[2]

The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party.

The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, which along with the United States House of Representatives—the lower chamber—comprises the legislature of the United States. The Senate chamber is located in the north wing of the Capitol, in Washington, D.C.

The Senate Majority and Minority Leaders are two United States Senators and members of the party leadership of the United States Senate. These leaders serve as the chief Senate spokespeople for the political parties respectively holding the majority and the minority in the United States Senate, and manage and schedule the legislative and executive business of the Senate. They are elected to their positions in the Senate by the party caucuses: the Senate Democratic Caucus and the Senate Republican Conference.

Goldwater ran an aggressive campaign against the entrenched Democrat, accumulating over fifty thousand air-miles in his travels about the state, during which he delivered more than six hundred speeches. He defeated McFarland in the general election by a slim margin of 6,725 votes out of approximately 260,000 cast, which Goldwater attributed in part to the unpopularity of President Harry S. Truman and the backing of popular Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Goldwater also launched a get out the vote effort in the northern part of the state, knowing the margin of victory would be slim, and received support from Republican Party campaign organizations and several prominent party members.^[3]

Harry S. Truman 33rd president of the United States

Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States from 1945 to 1953, succeeding upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt after serving as vice president. He implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe, and established the Truman Doctrine and NATO.

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. He is known for alleging that numerous Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, the smear tactics that he used led him to be censured by the U.S. Senate. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.

Get out the vote efforts aimed at increasing the voter turnout in elections

"Get out the vote" describes efforts aimed at increasing the voter turnout in elections. In countries that do not have or enforce compulsory voting, voter turnout can be low, sometimes even below a third of the eligible voter pool. GOTV is generally not required for elections when there are effective compulsory voting systems in place, other than perhaps to register first time voters.

The election marked the end of the Senate career of Ernest McFarland, who was first elected in 1940 and had served as co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Navajo-Hopi Indian Administration in addition to Senate Majority Leader. He was later elected Governor of Arizona in 1954 and ran unsuccessfully for his former Senate seat in 1958.^[4]

In the United States, a governor serves as the chief executive officer and commander-in-chief in each of the fifty states and in the five permanently inhabited territories, functioning as both head of state and head of government therein. As such, governors are responsible for implementing state laws and overseeing the operation of the state executive branch. As state leaders, governors advance and pursue new and revised policies and programs using a variety of tools, among them executive orders, executive budgets, and legislative proposals and vetoes. Governors carry out their management and leadership responsibilities and objectives with the support and assistance of department and agency heads, many of whom they are empowered to appoint. A majority of governors have the authority to appoint state court judges as well, in most cases from a list of names submitted by a nominations committee.

Candidates

Democratic

Ernest McFarland , incumbent U.S. Senator^[4]

Republican

Barry Goldwater , Phoenix City Councilman ^[5]

Campaign

After becoming a member of the Phoenix City Council in 1949,^[5] Barry Goldwater assumed a position as campaign manager of fellow Republican John Howard Pyle's successful 1950 bid for Governor of Arizona. After Pyle's narrow victory in the 1950 election, Goldwater began exploring the possibility of running for higher office himself and won re-election to his seat on the Phoenix Council by a comfortable margin. Goldwater's interest compounded in 1951, the same year he won re-election to his council seat, when Illinois U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen visited Phoenix. Goldwater, while at a cocktail party for Dirksen, was approached by the Illinois Senator, who encouraged him to run for Incumbent Democratic Senator Ernest McFarland's seat. Goldwater said later that he had estimated his chances at winning the election to be fifteen-to-one. Nonetheless, Goldwater began conducting research on McFarland and studied the election returns of Howard Pyle's 1950 gubernatorial victory, leading him to re-estimate his chances to be fifty-fifty.^[3]

A campaign manager or campaign director is a paid or volunteer individual whose role is to coordinate a political campaign's operations such as fundraising, advertising, polling, getting out the vote, and other activities supporting the effort, directly.

John Howard Pyle was the ninth governor of the U.S. state of Arizona, serving from 1951 to 1955. He was a Republican. A 1930 graduate of Arizona State University, he also was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.

Illinois is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It has the fifth largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth largest population, and the 25th largest land area of all U.S. states. Illinois is often noted as a microcosm of the entire United States. With Chicago in northeastern Illinois, small industrial cities and immense agricultural productivity in the north and center of the state, and natural resources such as coal, timber, and petroleum in the south, Illinois has a diverse economic base, and is a major transportation hub. Chicagoland, Chicago's metropolitan area, encompasses over 65% of the state's population. The Port of Chicago connects the state to international ports via two main routes: from the Great Lakes, via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, via the Illinois Waterway to the Illinois River. The Mississippi River, the Ohio River, and the Wabash River form parts of the boundaries of Illinois. For decades, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has been ranked as one of the world's busiest airports. Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and, through the 1980s, in politics.

Goldwater had been campaigning for several months before formally announcing his candidacy for McFarland's U.S. Senate seat on April 24, 1952. In his formal announcement, Goldwater cited six reasons for his entering the Senate race: his belief "that a life-long familiarity with the State of Arizona and its people and intensive study of the problems and needs of this region as a businessman and citizen qualifies me to represent efficiently our state in Washington,"^[3] his opposition to the expansion of the federal government and belief in states' rights, his opposition to the New Deal and Fair Deal programs, his belief that a U.S. Senator should not be "a mere rubber stamp for any administration,"^[3] and his opposition to the "present tragic trend toward the destruction of individual freedom."^[3]

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington or D.C., is the capital of the United States. Founded after the American Revolution as the seat of government of the newly independent country, Washington was named after George Washington, first President of the United States and Founding Father. As the seat of the United States federal government and several international organizations, Washington is an important world political capital. The city is also one of the most visited cities in the world, with more than 20 million tourists annually.

In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment. The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitution include exclusive federal powers, as well as concurrent powers that are shared with the states, and all of those powers are contrasted with the reserved powers—also called states' rights—that only the states possess.

New Deal Economic programs of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt

The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1936. It responded to needs for relief, reform, and recovery from the Great Depression. Major federal programs included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The divisive race between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft for the Republican nomination in the 1952 presidential race became cause for concern for state Republicans, Goldwater in particular. He confided to an associate of the Republican National Committee, Clarence Buddington Kelland, that he believed the Democrats were beginning to benefit from the "constant bickering"^[3] within the party. This, believed Goldwater, was the best-case scenario for the Democrats, including McFarland, who was hindered in his bid for re-election by the unpopularity of the Truman administration.^[3]

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was an American army general and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was a five-star general in the United States Army and served as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He was responsible for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front.

Robert A. Taft politician from the United States, son of 27th US President William Howard Taft

Robert Alphonso Taft Sr. was an American conservative politician, lawyer, and scion of the Republican Party's Taft family. Taft represented Ohio in the United States Senate, briefly served as Senate Majority Leader, and was a leader of the conservative coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats who prevented expansion of the New Deal. Often referred to as "Mr. Republican," he cosponsored the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which banned closed shops and other labor practices.

Originally believing he could run a campaign on his own with relatively few resources, Goldwater hired a campaign manager in June 1952, Stephen Shadegg, who had previously worked on the campaign of Democratic U.S. Senator Carl Hayden. Goldwater also received financial and logistical help from the Republican National Committee and the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Goldwater also received financial backing from prominent Republicans, including Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt ^[3] and easily defeated his sole opponent, Lester Kahl, in the Republican primary on September 8.^[6]^[7] Goldwater employed a general election strategy of focusing get out the vote efforts on the three northernmost counties of Arizona, inhabited primarily by the Navajo and Hopi Native American peoples. Feeling the margin would be close in the election results, Goldwater believed these efforts, especially efforts to organize a voter registration campaign in the northern counties, to be crucial for victory, writing to Everett Dirksen in May that "this might well be the margin of victory in this state."^[3]

Results

On Election Day, November 4, 1952, Barry Goldwater defeated incumbent Ernest McFarland by a slim margin, winning by 6,725 out of approximately 260,000 votes cast, becoming the first Republican to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate since 1920. Goldwater, writing to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, said of the results, "The election victory was not entirely a surprise, because we knew that McFarland, carrying the weight of Truman's mistakes around his neck, would have a difficult time winning, particularly in view of the fact that I had spent nearly all of my life campaigning for this job, whether I realized it or not."^[3]

Arizona United States Senate election, 1952^[1]^[2]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±
	Republican	Barry Goldwater	132,063	51.31	+21.18
	Democratic	Ernest McFarland (incumbent)	125,338	48.69	-20.49
Majority			6,725	2.61	-36.44
Turnout			257,401	82.28	+23.65
	Republican gain from Democratic		Swing

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References

1 2 "AZ US Senate". OurCampaigns. Retrieved 2 August 2012.
1 2 Dubin, Michael J. (1998). United States congressional elections, 1788-1997 : the official results of the elections of the 1st through 105th congresses. Jefferson, NC [u.a.]: McFarland. p. 407. ISBN 0786402830.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Dean, John W. and Goldwater, Barry M., Jr. (2008). Pure Goldwater (1st ed.). New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0230611338.
1 2 "McFARLAND, Ernest William, (1894 - 1984)". Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress. Retrieved 2 August 2012.
1 2 "GOLDWATER, Barry Morris, (1909 - 1998)". Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress. Archived from the original on June 25, 2013. Retrieved 2 August 2012.
↑ "Foes of President Victorious at Polls". The Times-News. 10 September 1952. Retrieved 2 August 2012.
↑ "AZ US Senate - R Primary". Our Campaigns. Retrieved 2 August 2012.

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[results-1] 1 2 "AZ US Senate". OurCampaigns. Retrieved 2 August 2012.

[dubin-2] 1 2 Dubin, Michael J. (1998). United States congressional elections, 1788-1997 : the official results of the elections of the 1st through 105th congresses. Jefferson, NC [u.a.]: McFarland. p. 407. ISBN 0786402830.

[dean-3] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Dean, John W. and Goldwater, Barry M., Jr. (2008). Pure Goldwater (1st ed.). New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0230611338.

[mcfarlandbio-4] 1 2 "McFARLAND, Ernest William, (1894 - 1984)". Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress. Retrieved 2 August 2012.

[bio1-5] 1 2 "GOLDWATER, Barry Morris, (1909 - 1998)". Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress. Archived from the original on June 25, 2013. Retrieved 2 August 2012.

[rprimary-6] "Foes of President Victorious at Polls". The Times-News. 10 September 1952. Retrieved 2 August 2012.

[7] "AZ US Senate - R Primary". Our Campaigns. Retrieved 2 August 2012.

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Family and personal life	Barry Goldwater, Jr. (son) Morris Goldwater (uncle) Don Goldwater (nephew)
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