While the two parties began the 1964 presidential contest with few differences on issues
of race, that campaign began to draw the lines of distinction between the parties’ views on race.
Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater took his party to the right on racial issues,
campaigning on a platform opposed to the Civil Rights Act (Goldwater voted against the bill in
the Senate). Goldwater heavily courted white voters in the south, claiming that he was not a
racist, but rather believed in states rights and non-intervention on issues of race by the federal
government (Carmines and Stimpson, 1989).
President Johnson, on the other hand, campaigned for continued racial equality and civil
rights, turning his party to the left of where it had been just four years earlier. Through the 1964
election, the Democratic and Republican Parties distinguished themselves on issues of race, with
an almost complete reversal of ideologies. Democrats were now seen as the party of inclusion
and sympathy to the African American cause, while Republicans became the party of racial
conservatism (Carmine & Stimson, 1989; Kinder & Sears, 1996; Mendelberg, 2001). The 1964
election had delineated the differences between the two parties, and those differences have only
solidified since then (Kinder & Sears, 1996).
By 1966, after the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed with full support from
President Johnson, the Democratic Party found themselves increasingly relying on the African
American vote at the polls (Bolce, De Maio & Muzzio, 1992; Sirgo, 1995; Thernstrom &
Thernstrom, 1997; Barker, 1980). While the Democrats were gaining the expanding black vote,
they lost support from white, mostly southern, conservatives on whom they used to rely.
Because of this, the black vote became all the more important to Democratic presidential
candidates. As several historians have noted, “black Americans had become a sizable and
received challenges yet Democratic presidential candidates did little to push the party fearing the loss of southern
votes.)
Convention