1964: Republican states HEAVILY for LBJ

[Calthrina950]

In addition to the states here, Johnson also got 62% in Iowa, which was a normally Republican stronghold at the time, having voted for Nixon by double digits in 1960, and 66% in New Jersey, which was a Republican-leaning state from the 1940s to the 1980s (it had narrowly voted for Kennedy in 1960 thanks to his strong performance among Catholic and blue-collar voters, but went Republican in the other close elections of 1948, 1968, and 1976). Johnson is the only Democrat to have gotten over 60% in Ohio.

And Colorado, as noted, was generally a Republican state in those days. From 1940-2004, the state only voted Democratic three times (1948, 1964, 1992), and Johnson's landslide win was bordered on each side by easy victories for Nixon in close elections. Johnson's 61.27% is the second-highest percentage any Democrat has ever received in the state, behind only William Jennings Bryan's 84.95% in 1896.

[Calthrina950]

LBJ received about 60% of the vote.  But some of the states where he did better than this are surprising when you consider that they were normally Republican states at the time or states that are culturally similar to the states Goldwater won.  In other words, LBJ didn't just win these states, but he won them by an EVEN BIGGER margin than he did nationally.  Note that the >60% LBJ states include:
1.  Alaska, 66%, always heavily Republican ever since
2.  Colorado, 61%, only won since then by Clinton in 1992 and only with Perot's help
3.  Missouri, 64%, culturally similar to the South
4.  Kentucky, 64%, ditto
5.  Vermont, 66%, went Republican again through 1988
6.  New Hampshire, 64%, went back to being heavily Republican (2nd most Republican in 1988) before changing in 1992

VT and NH make a lot of sense. They were GOP strongholds, but were filled with northeastern, socially liberal ("Rockefeller") Republicans. Eisenhower and to a lesser extent Nixon embodied these values, while Goldwater was perceived as a radical, racist conservative - precisely the opposite of the type of candidates New England voters liked. These were ancestrally Republican votes who'd stayed Republican against FDR, but who drew the line at supporting a perceived racist. Nixon wasn't considered nearly as racist or radically conservative as Goldwater, so he won back the key voting bloc of moderate voters in New England that formed the backbone of that region's GOP.

And MO makes some sense (though I'd imagined the margin to be somewhat smaller). Only Southeast MO is culturally similar to the south; unlike other southern states, by 1904 MO established its status as a swing state  (by going to Roosevelt). Northern Missouri was and is less culturally similar to the south than Southern Illinois. Southwest Missouri was a GOP stronghold, but it wasn't inclined to support perceived radicals like Goldwater. (Most of Southwest MO broke for Johnson, though a couple of counties in the region did go red.) The rest of the state (excluding Southeast MO, obviously) isn't culturally similar to the south, either. And even Southeast MO was less Deep South, racist Dixtiecrat - type than Southern states, more labour-orientated and more dependent on government programs (and more concerned about them than denying voting rights to African-Americans). Consequently, the only red counties in Missouri were a handful scattered throughout the state. There was no part of Missouri truly affiliated even remotely to the Deep South - Southeast Missouri, in some ways, but not in 1964.

Strangely enough, Missouri had a Kennedy-Goldwater county: Osage County. Osage County, along with Camas and Custer Counties, ID, Emmons County, ND, and Dorchester County, MD, was one of the few counties outside of the old Confederacy to shift from Kennedy to Goldwater. I'm assuming it was because of Catholicism: the county has several private Roman Catholic schools. Aside from Osage County, Cole County was the only other county in Missouri to swing Republican that year, and was won by Goldwater (Nixon had also carried it in 1960). I'm not sure what happened there. But the remainder of the state swung to Johnson, with the greatest swings occurring in ancestrally Republican SW Missouri and across much of SE Missouri, where Kennedy had lost considerable ground compared to Stevenson due to anti-Catholicism.

[Calthrina950]

I know this isn’t exactly a novel point to anyone here but I really think it’s just an illustration of how much more elastic the entire electorate was in that era. People had long-standing party loyalties but they also were more likely to break overwhelmingly against an unfavorable member of their party in the right circumstances.

This is certainly true. I've been obsessively comparing Eisenhower's 1956 landslide reelection with Johnson's 1964 landslide, and it's astonishing how closely the two parallel each other, and contrast each other. Johnson won every Eisenhower state except for Arizona and Louisiana, besides carrying the Stevenson states of Arkansas, Missouri, and North Carolina, while Goldwater won the four Stevenson states in the Deep South. In many states, the results are almost the exact opposite from Eisenhower to Johnson. In others - particularly in the Northeast, but also in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin - Johnson won landslides in areas that had gone heavily for Eisenhower.

[Calthrina950]

This is how each state voted in relation to the NPV in 1964

Wow.  Some of the Midwest looks like residual Catholic goodwill from his ties to Kennedy.  LBJ also really held the Border State New Dealers well.

Johnson actually did slightly worse among Catholics than Kennedy in 1960. You can see this with the flip of heavily Catholic Osage and Emmons Counties to Goldwater and the relatively weak swings to Johnson in other Catholic-influenced counties like Ellis County, Kansas. But he did significantly better than Kennedy among Protestants, and the massive pro-Johnson swings in Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, to provide some examples, in areas where Kennedy had suffered greatly from anti-Catholicism, are evidence of this.