Did Goldwater's views on Medicare and Social Security cost him Florida?

[Calthrina950]

I know that Goldwater opposed Medicare, and I know that he supposedly wanted to make Social Security "voluntary" (what does that mean?). Did retirees living Florida vote for Lyndon because they wanted Medicare and feared Goldwater's plans for Social Security?

I read somewhere that Goldwater made a speech down in St. Petersburg that was about social security, and that the speech was not well received. It would not surprise me at all if retirees went for Johnson because of that.

[Calthrina950]

It's also interesting to note the geographic distribution of the vote in the two states that year. Goldwater still won most of the counties with substantial numbers of retirees in Florida, like Orange, Osceola, Polk, Lee, Sarasota, Manatee, Collier, etc. He also won Palm Beach, Duval, and Broward. But Johnson did win Pinellas, Hillsborough, Volusia, St. Lucie, Alachua, and Brevard, and improved in Monroe and Miami-Dade over how Kennedy did. His improvement in Miami-Dade and his carriage of Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Brevard seems to have canceled out Goldwater's gains in the Florida Panhandle and allowed him to narrowly flip the state.

In Virginia, Goldwater flipped many of the Dixiecrat rural counties in the southern part of the state, and held Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover Counties around Richmond. But Johnson won, in addition to Richmond itself, Virginia Beach, Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William; most of these counties had voted for Nixon in 1960, and were the ones that shifted the state into the Democratic column. I read elsewhere that suburban voters in both states, who had voted for Nixon four years prior, moved towards Johnson, primarily because of concerns related to healthcare and Social Security. I've also read that without black voters, both states would have remained Republican.

[Calthrina950]

There were a lot of racist people who voted for Johnson in spite of their racism because they found Goldwaters views on Medicare and Social Security even more dangerous than Johnsons views on Civil Rights.

Which helps to explain why Johnson was able to still win a narrow majority in the Confederate South as a whole and why he still managed to get over 40% in Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina.