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In July of 1964 the Republican Party held its National Convention in San Francisco, California. Although the majority of Republicans in the U.S. Senate had supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republican Party nominated for president Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had voted against both cloture and final passage. Goldwater, who defined himself as an ardent conservative, said the newly enacted civil rights law represented too great an extension of U.S. Government power over states' rights.
Incumbent Democratic president Lyndon Johnson easily defeated Senator Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republican Goldwater was able to carry the "Deep South" states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. He also carried his home state of Arizona. That was all, however. In one of the great landslides in presidential election history, President Johnson won every other state in the Northeast, the Midwest, the West, and the Upper South. In addition, President Johnson had long "coattails" and carried large numbers of Democrats into both the Senate and the House of Representatives with him.
Black voters in particular rewarded President Johnson for his highly visible and very skillful support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In many predominantly black precincts in large cities in the North, Johnson received more than 95 percent of the vote in the 1964 presidential election. This was almost 20 percent better than John F. Kennedy had polled with black voters in the 1960 presidential election. This strong shift of black voters to the Democratic Party endured to the mid-1990s, and even then showed no signs of ending.
It can be argued that the Republican Party's 1964 presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, undid much of the good work that Everett Dirksen had performed in the Senate for the Republican Party in the spring of 1964. Dirksen, after all, had rounded up the critical Republican votes needed to cloture the civil rights bill. Under other conditions, these actions on Dirksen's part might have moved significant numbers of black voters to vote for the GOP candidate for president. However, Goldwater was so outspokenly against the civil rights bill, and so much more visible than Dirksen, that black voters in 1964 abandoned the Republicans and began giving near-unanimous electoral support to the Democrats.
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