Two Years After Goldwater, the 1966 Midterm That Put the Right Back in It

By the morning after the 1964 election, the obituary of American conservatism had been written, typeset and, in a few newsrooms, practically framed. The movement was finished. The party was finished. The only question was which pundit would get to deliver the eulogy first.

Let me tell you what happened to the corpse. Two years later it gained 47 House seats, won governorships across the country and elected, to run the biggest state in the Union, a man who had never before stood for office. If that is what the press calls dead, I would like to see what it calls busy.

The night the obituaries were written

Give the pundits their due: 1964 was a rout. Lyndon Johnson took about 61 percent of the popular vote, the largest share of any presidential candidate in the modern era up to that time. Barry Goldwater carried his home state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South, six states in all, for 52 electoral votes. Republicans lost 36 House seats, leaving them with 140 to the Democrats' 295, and they went into the new Congress with only 32 Senators.

I will keep 1964 short, because the story of Goldwater himself belongs to the sister site and deserves its own telling. What matters here is the verdict the commentators drew. They argued that Goldwater had proved a limited-government, anti-Soviet, free-market message could not win a national election, and that the right ought to move to the center for good. The conclusion is worth stating plainly, because a great many people in the party believed it: the voters have spoken, and what they said was "never again."

Here is the first thing wrong with that conclusion. A single election measures a single candidate in a single set of circumstances. Johnson ran in the shadow of a martyred president, with a growing economy and an opponent whom his campaign worked hard to paint as reckless. Voters in 1964 were not asked whether they wanted a government that would soon spend on a scale the country had not seen in peacetime. They were asked whether they trusted one man's judgment over another's. Those are different questions, and the second one was always going to be answered before the first could be.

Then the government did what it said it would do

The thing about a landslide is that the winner has to govern. President Johnson had won a mandate and a Congress to match, and he spent them. The Great Society became law in a rush: the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 launched the War on Poverty; in 1965 Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act put federal money into local schools; the Voting Rights Act became law the same year. Conservatives supported some of that agenda, notably the Voting Rights Act, which enforces a promise of the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the disagreement over the rest was about cost, scope and who should decide. But the dominant story by 1966 was a government that had grown a great deal in a very short time.

Three things went wrong for the majority, and I want to take them in the numbered way a good argument deserves.

1. The costs arrived. Programs created in a rush by a confident majority do not stay the size on the brochure. Spending climbed, and so did prices. An administration that had promised to do much more with the government's money found that the money was also needed in Southeast Asia.
2. Vietnam changed. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in August 1964, and by 1965 American combat units were on the ground. The war of 1966 was not the war the 1964 campaign had described, and the gap between those two descriptions did the administration no good.
3. Order broke down in places. The Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965 and the unrest that followed in other cities, together with the campus turmoil that began at Berkeley in the fall of 1964, put crime and disorder on the ballot for the first time in a generation. Voters who had been told that Washington could manage everything saw a country that seemed less managed.

None of that required a conservative to say a word. A government that outruns its promises provides the argument by itself, and it was a short walk from the voter's anxiety to the Republican message: you were told this would work, and it is costing you more than you were told and delivering less than you were promised.

What was left behind

Now the part I like best. Goldwater lost, but his campaign left something on the ground that the pundits did not count. It had recruited a generation of volunteers, precinct workers, young activists and small donors who had never been part of the Republican organization and who did not leave when the polls closed. They had learned the mechanics of a campaign: lists, phone banks, mailings, block captains. They had learned something harder, which is how to keep working for a cause after it loses.

That is the mechanism behind every comeback in this series. A defeat sorts people. Those who joined for the glamour of a winner go home. Those who joined for the argument stay, and the argument they stay for is usually sharper after a loss than before, because a loss forces it to be stated without the cushion of a favorite's momentum. If you want to see how this works across the century, my colleagues have laid it out in Comebacks Start the Morning After, Lessons From the Defeats of 1964, 1974, 2008, and Tocqueville saw the principle in the 1830s in Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads: Americans solve problems by forming associations, and associations outlast elections.

And one speech in particular did some of the organizing. In late October 1964, a former actor named Ronald Reagan gave a televised address in support of Goldwater's candidacy, a long argument for limited government and against what he called the drift toward centralized control. It did not save the campaign, but it raised about a million dollars for the campaign, and within two years its speaker was running for governor of California.

Reagan against Brown

The incumbent was Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, a Democrat who had been governor since 1959 and who had won re-election in 1962 by defeating Richard Nixon. Brown was a serious politician with a serious record: he had championed a statewide water project and a master plan for higher education. If you wanted to design the hardest possible race for a first-time candidate, you would start with Brown.

Reagan entered it anyway. He announced in January 1966, won the Republican primary that June, and ran a general-election campaign on a handful of themes that voters could repeat from memory. One was the cost of government: taxes, welfare rolls and spending. One was crime and public order. One was the state of the University of California campuses, where the protests of the 1964-65 school year had left many voters, including many who had no quarrel with the students' right to speak, wondering who was in charge. And one was his own status as a citizen who had not made politics a profession, an argument I would say is underrated and would defend as a Founding-era instinct: the republic assumes that ordinary citizens will take their turn at governing.

Brown's campaign struck back by arguing that Reagan was an unqualified actor and an extremist, an echo of the 1964 playbook. It did not work. In November, Reagan won the governorship by nearly a million votes, taking roughly 58 percent of the total. A man who had never held a public office, a candidate the establishment had thought could not win, had beaten the incumbent of a state that the Democrats had held for years.

Now consider that for a moment against the standard version of 1964. The movement that was supposed to be buried in November of that year had produced, two Novembers later, the winner of the largest state's top job, and the winner of that job would be president within fourteen years. Pardon me for finding that a bit of a comeback.

The rest of the map

California was the headline, but the national picture did not need it. In 1966, Republicans gained 47 seats in the House of Representatives, which moved them from 140 seats to 187. Read that again: they had lost 36 in 1964 and won back 47 in 1966, which is to say that in two years they more than erased the loss and ended up with eleven more seats than they started with in 1963. (The arithmetic is simple: 47 minus 36 is 11.) In the Senate they gained three seats. They gained governorships in a large number of states, a net of seven or eight depending on the count.

The new faces tell the story just as well as the totals do. Republicans elected Charles Percy to the Senate in Illinois, Mark Hatfield in Oregon, and Edward Brooke in Massachusetts, who became the first Black American elected to the Senate by popular vote. George Romney won re-election as governor of Michigan, and in Maryland a county executive named Spiro Agnew won the governor's office, a result that tells you the 1966 wave did not pick its winners with perfect wisdom. A wave brings in people the party will be proud of and people it will wish it had vetted more closely. That is why the next election, and the primary before it, matters so much.

The coalition that voted for those candidates was broad. It included the suburban voters who worried about their taxes, the families who worried about crime, the Southern and border-state voters who were drifting from the Democrats, and the movement conservatives who had never stopped working. Reading that coalition as an expression of Goldwater's rout, as some did at the time, misses the point. It was the same coalition he had awakened, arriving at a moment when the other side had handed it a list of grievances.

The best case against the comeback story

An honest account of 1966 has to deal with the best objection, which is this: midterms always punish the president's party, and 1966 is just the pendulum swinging back after a landslide year.

That is a good objection and a partly correct one. The president's party does lose seats in midterms in almost every modern case, and a party that had won a historic majority in 1964 had many marginal seats that it could not hold. I take that seriously, and I take it up directly in Why the President's Party Almost Always Loses the Midterm, and the Exceptions, where the pattern is laid out with the arithmetic.

But the objection explains less than it appears to. It says the Republicans should have recovered some seats, and does not tell us why they recovered a large number of them, why they won governorships, why a first-time candidate beat a seasoned incumbent in the nation's largest state, or why the next decade of conservative politics was built on the people who had survived 1964. The pendulum is a reason the gain was available. It is not a reason the party was ready to take it. Preparedness is the difference between a party that profits from a swing and one that stands by and watches.

There is a second objection, from the right: that Goldwater's defeat damaged the cause, and conservatives should not romanticize a loss. I agree that losses are not victories. The point is narrower. A defeat can do some of the work of a victory if the movement uses it to recruit, to sharpen its argument and to build its lists. The alternative to using a defeat is to waste it, and the people who waste defeats do not usually come back.

Why a movement's worst night recruits its next generation

Let me put the lesson in a short list, since you will want to hold it in your head the next time somebody tells you that a loss means the end.

1. A loss separates the committed from the curious. After 1964, those who stayed were there for the ideas, and ideas are portable. They can be carried into the next race by a different candidate.
2. A loss gives you an enemy to define. The majority that wins big overreaches, because a majority that wins big believes it has been given permission. The overreach becomes the minority's best argument.
3. A loss invites new candidates. Reagan, who had never run for anything, was available in 1966 because 1964 had shown him what the argument could do and what the party lacked. New candidates are easier to recruit when the old guard has been shown to be out of ideas.
4. A loss is cheap compared to the alternative. A party that compromises its argument to avoid losing wins nothing and teaches its voters that it believes in nothing. A party that loses on principle can be believed the next time.
5. A loss forces organization. Lists, volunteers and donors are the permanent assets of a movement, and they are built in the lean years, not the fat ones. For the full account of how ideas, organizations and candidates fit together, see The Ideas Came First, How Magazines and Think Tanks Built the 1980 Landslide.

The Founders' two-year clock

There is something quietly constitutional about all this, and I want to name it. Article I, Section 2 provides that the House shall be composed of members "chosen every second Year by the People of the several States." The Founders built a House that could be turned over entirely in two years, and they did it on purpose, so that a majority's overreach could be corrected before it hardened into habit. In 1964 the voters gave one party a giant majority. In 1966 they used the two-year clock to correct it. That is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed.

I find that reassuring. A republic that can swing 47 House seats in two years is a republic in which no landslide is the last word, and no defeat is the last word either. The people who declared conservatism dead in 1964 were making a prediction about the future of a country whose institutions are built to refuse them. For a longer view of what a minority can control and what it cannot, read Five Conservative Comebacks Side by Side, and the Ingredient They All Shared, and for an earlier case of a party that waited out the wilderness, read Had Enough? The 1946 Midterm That Ended Sixteen Years in the Wilderness.

The case in brief

1. The 1964 landslide, with Johnson at about 61 percent and Republicans losing 36 House seats, was read as the end of conservatism, but a single election measures a single candidate in a single moment.
2. The Great Society's costs, the Vietnam escalation and the disorder of the mid-1960s gave voters reasons to doubt the majority's promises.
3. The Goldwater campaign left behind volunteers, donors and a sharper argument, and a televised speech in 1964 raised Ronald Reagan's profile two years before he ran.
4. In 1966 Republicans gained 47 House seats, three Senate seats and seven or eight governorships, and Reagan beat Governor Pat Brown by nearly a million votes in California.
5. A movement's worst night can recruit its next generation, provided the movement uses the defeat to organize and to sharpen its argument rather than to abandon it.

What you can do: look up the House member who represents you at Congress.gov, find the year that member first won the seat, and read what the district's race looked like the cycle before, so that you know whether your district is one a wave could move.