Goldwater Presidential Campaign Mobilizes Business Coalition and Establishes Conservative Infrastructure

The 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign galvanizes a grassroots coalition of businesspeople, Southerners, Midwesterners, and libertarians who feel sidelined by the Republican establishment, establishing political infrastructure and strategies that become standard tenets of Republican politics for decades. The “Draft Goldwater” movement begins in 1961 when twenty-two conservatives led by Ohio Representative John M. Ashbrook, National Review publisher William A. Rusher, and scholar F. Clifton White meet privately in Chicago to discuss formation of a grass-roots organization to secure the nomination of a conservative as the 1964 Republican candidate. The rough-edged, charismatic Westerner overcomes his party’s old guard by mobilizing suburban conservative Republicans concentrated in the South and West who favor low taxes, small federal government supporting individual rights and business interests, and opposition to social welfare programs.

Conservative organizations including the John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom, and journals like National Review grow in prominence during the campaign, with Goldwater becoming most associated with anti-union work and anti-communism as a supporter of the conservative coalition in Congress. His work on labor issues leads Congress to pass major anti-labor reforms in 1957. The campaign attracts businesspeople finding racial unrest, liberal Democratic policies, Supreme Court decisions, youth culture, rising crime rates, and anti-Vietnam War movement to be threats to traditional morality, patriotism, states’ rights, and capitalism. Though Goldwater loses the 1964 election in a landslide, the strategic and political infrastructure created by the Draft Goldwater movement proves transformative.

Without Goldwater’s philosophy and the organizational infrastructure his campaign creates, according to observers, there likely would have been no Reagan or Bush administrations, and possibly no Nixon administration either. Senator John McCain later praises Goldwater as the man who “transformed the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan.” The policy positions and electoral strategies of the Goldwater campaign—particularly the Southern Strategy appealing to white voters opposed to civil rights legislation—become foundational to Republican success. The 1964 campaign demonstrates that conservative business mobilization, organizational infrastructure building, and grassroots coordination are well underway throughout the early 1960s, seven years before the Powell Memo supposedly awakens corporate political consciousness. The Goldwater campaign establishes the template for business-funded conservative movement building that accelerates throughout the late 1960s and explodes in the 1970s.