WASHINGTON, Oct. 26, 2016 - Late October polling patterns
showing Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump mired at or below 40
percent invite comparisons with the 1964 election that Barry Goldwater lost in
a landslide. In the final month of that campaign, Goldwater never exceeded 34
percent in Harris and Gallup polls but ended up with 38 percent to Democrat
Lyndon Johnson’s 61 percent.
Several elements of this year’s campaign evoke memories of
1964 – significant defections of Republican office-holders and business
executives from the party’s nominee and large numbers of normally
GOP-supporting newspapers that endorsed the Democratic candidate.
But the 2016 campaign also has notable differences from 52
years ago. Then, the Democrat was an incumbent president; the Internet and
social media were only in science fiction; there was no Fox News Channel, Rush
Limbaugh or Drudge Report to root for a conservative challenger. The issues and
the makeup of the electorate also were starkly different.
From the perspective of agricultural and rural politics,
perhaps the sharpest contrast is how the candidates fared in rural areas. Like
today, political analysts in 1964 found the GOP nominee’s chances slim outside
the South, but unlike today, even narrowing in farm areas. “Goldwater’s efforts
to tuck away the electoral votes of the conservative traditionally Republican
states of the Great Plains are stumbling,” Donald Janson wrote in The New York Times Oct. 22, 1964.
The Democratic campaign’s all-out effort was captured by
Theodore H. White, who wrote in his classic, “The Making of the President
1964,” that the Rural Americans for Johnson-Humphrey committee was
“exceptionally able.” Well-funded and coordinated and staffed in Washington by
political appointees who took leave from their USDA jobs, the campaign flooded
state-level activists and operatives with literature, bumper stickers, buttons
and advertising copy that painted Goldwater as a threat to farm price supports
and other rural programs.
“In every county, working through the Farmers Union and the
rural electrification cooperatives,” White wrote, the Johnson-Humphrey campaign
“could mobilize thousands” to defend farm programs and the rural electric
program. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), whose
members were active in the campaign effort, said that “in no less than 23
states the rural vote went more heavily for Johnson than in the state as a
whole,” White wrote. Farmers voted 3-1 for Johnson in Kentucky, North Dakota,
Oregon, Texas and Washington.
President Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, his vice presidential
running mate, both paid attention to the farm vote. Leaders of Rural America
for Johnson-Humphrey were given an audience with LBJ in the White House Rose
Garden Sept. 14, 1964. “Our agricultural policies must never be made blindly,”
he said. “They must never be predicated upon a bias or prejudice against the
farmer.”
Election of Goldwater would be a “death sentence to
agriculture,” Humphrey said at the National Plowing Contest in North Dakota that
same month, citing Goldwater’s book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” that
called for “prompt and final termination of the farm subsidy program.” He
preceded that appearance with speeches in four towns in his native South
Dakota, The New York Times reported,
likely the most attention the state has had from a presidential campaign since.
The role of NRECA and its member cooperatives in the rural
effort to re-elect LBJ created its own fallout. “The leader of the nation’s
biggest farm organization suggested yesterday that the Hatch Act [which
prohibits federal employee political activity] should be amended to apply to
employees of rural electric cooperatives,” Chicago
Tribune farm editor Richard Orr wrote in late November. “The suggestion
came from Charles B. Shuman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation
(AFBF),” in response to a request for comment, Orr said. “Following the
election Norman Clapp, REA administrator, credited co-op leaders across the
nation with spearheading a campaign which he said achieved a record-shattering
rural Democratic vote.”
Orr quoted Jerry L. Anderson, then executive assistant to
NRECA’s general manager and a key leader of the rural campaign, who said
Goldwater’s opposition to rural electrification and other rural programs cost
the Republican nominee “millions of votes.” Orr said Shuman disagreed with the
impact of NRECA but said that it “and many electric co-ops put on quite a
campaign of opposition to Senator Goldwater and many members of Congress.”
Another major departure from 1964: Trump is no Goldwater, as
political newsletter editor Stuart Rothenberg wrote in May. The Gallup Poll
estimated that LBJ won 20 percent of Republicans’ votes in those days,
Rothenberg wrote. “Obviously, defections even half that would be fatal for
Trump, since only 6 percent of 2012 Republicans voted for Obama, according to
the exit poll.”
#30
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