Actually, given opinion polls that suggested overwhelming public opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to liberal government and Supreme Court decisions over the previous years (e.g. 85 percent of those polled opposed
Engel v. Vitale outlawing prayer in public schools), I do not think it would have been nearly so impossible for Goldwater to win as is popularly thought.
What Goldwater would have had to do is to avoid making lower- and middle-class whites, especially rural whites, not fear-struck by the threat of Communist retaliation and a global nuclear war. Goldwater’s actual idea of using tactical nuclear strikes undoubtedly scared immense numbers of people who were firmly against even basic civil rights for African-Americans into supporting a pro-Civil-Rights president even if they had
always voted Republican in other elections.
Focusing simply on an invasion of North Vietnam would have been more logical but still highly risky due to the possibility of retaliation from either or both of Russia and Mao’s China (despite the two having become mortal enemies) that would have had the same effect as an actual nuclear strike. Then, a more rigid draft would have been unpopular even amongst racially conservative rural whites (who for one thing did not volunteer
en masse for the Vietnam War).
Other alternatives – more emphasis on keeping established immigration policies, for instance – might have helped, but how much I do not know. One of Goldwater’s problems was the potential conflict between his libertarian economic policies and his hard-line Vietnam policies, which made him so unpopular outside the racially extreme Deep South and Mountain states.
If Goldwater had won, he would likely have had some coattails in the House and Senate to carry out his platform of reversing the New Deal and subsequent economically liberal Democratic policies. Large-scale deregulation and privatisation of federal assets, and cessation of support for black civil rights, are certainly possible. However, I feel that unless Goldwater could do most of the following:
- solidify Republican support amongst rural whites to a degree not reached until Bush junior or Romney more than a generation later
- manage to successfully win the Vietnam War permanently
- via cessation of support for black civil rights avert the racial conflicts observed in 1966 and 1967
he might have lost support before being up for re-election.
Even if opposition to black civil rights did reduce racial conflict, and Goldwater was able to give police and other law enforcement much more leeway in black communities the existing liberal Supreme Court would have sided with black plaintiffs against police brutality as it never did even during the Reagan years – let alone since the Republican Revolution of 1994. It is virtually certain a President Goldwater would have received zero high court appointments between 1965 and 1969. I strongly suspect Barry Goldwater knew – because of the improbability of a Supreme Court opening between 1965 and 1969 under so conservative an administration – that he could not use an excessively liberal Court as a campaign issue. This undoubtedly helped Johnson by removing a persuasive issue from the 1964 Republican campaign arsenal.
A Supreme Court siding with plaintiffs against law enforcementcould have nullified a strong policy on law and order and made Goldwater less popular unless crime rates
fell rather than rose rapidly as actually observed. What would have happened after that is difficult to tell, and depends on the factors noted above plus many others
