Why Did LBJ win Florida, the Upper South, and Idaho in 1964?

[mianfei]

And why wasn’t white backlash enough in the Upper South to flip it to Goldwater?

The Upper South was not pro-civil rights, but it wasn’t as an important issue as it was in the Deep South.  Also, the fact that LBJ was a Southerner (a Texan) may have helped.

There’s also the critical issue that Goldwater wanted to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority, which many writers believed prevented him from winning Tennessee. William C. Harvard in The Changing Politics of the South from 1970 and the more recent Winning the White House, 2008 (page 107; various authors) both argue Goldwater could have won Tennessee had he not supported TVA privatization.

In Texas – and possibly also Oklahoma and Arkansas – the fact that Lyndon Johnson was a Texan no doubt did help him a great deal.

In Oklahoma and Texas, there would also no doubt have been severe hostility to Goldwater’s TVA proposals for the very simple reason that those two states possess, especially vis-à-vis the rest of the South, very limited water resources. Given that he wanted to privatize the Tennessee Valley authority, it’s extremely easy to see how Oklahomans would have imagined Goldwater privatizing Oklahoma’s water supply with increased costs for ordinary citizens.

[mianfei]

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Fears Goldwater would end various public works projects and other federal programs trumped race in much of the South that year.

I have thought a bit since my previous posts, and the big surprise seems to me to have been Goldwater's inability to hold Virginia (which voted Republican at every other election from 1952 to 2004). I checked and found Goldwater lost Virginia by quite a bit less than I thought - seven percentage points, which made it his tenth strongest state and was about six points less than I remembered wrongly.

Virginia was similar to the Deep South in having a very restricted electorate due to the control of the Byrd Organization, and loss of Federal public works would have been a much less critical issue for Virginia than the inland Upper South. However, Democratic gains compared to 1960 in the coal country counties of the far southwest, and the western Shenandoah Valley, seem to have more than countered Goldwater's Southside gains in counties which would mostly vote for Wallace in 1968.

Given the Byrd Organization's strength in the Shanandoah Valley, why did it move away from Goldwater in 1964?