1964 Electoral Map

1964 Election Results

Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide, winning 486 electoral votes to 52 and roughly 61% of the popular vote. Just four years after Kennedy’s narrow victory, Democrats carried 44 states and the District of Columbia.

There was no decisive battleground. Johnson swept the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast, adding Republican states such as Ohio, California and Wisconsin to Kennedy’s 1960 coalition. Goldwater held only his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.

That small Republican foothold was the election’s most consequential regional shift. Johnson’s support for the Civil Rights Act, and Goldwater’s opposition to it, helped turn white Southern voters against the Democratic ticket even as the rest of the country moved sharply toward Johnson.

Having assumed the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson campaigned on stability and portrayed Goldwater as dangerously extreme, particularly on nuclear weapons. The victory gave Johnson the political strength to advance his Great Society agenda. But beneath the overwhelming national result, the old Democratic South was breaking apart.