-There’s nothing left, ladies and gentlemen,
nothing left of principles that your fathers and
your grandfathers and your great-grandfathers stood for in the
Democratic Party at the national level.
-Today, many Americans consider the Republican Party to be
synonymous with conservatives and the Democratic Party to be
synonymous with liberals.
But in 1966, that was not the case.
-This year, I will be seeking nomination and reelection
as a Republican.
-In the 1966 midterms, you see the beginnings of these shifts.
And in that sense it was one of the more significant midterm
elections of the past 50, 60 years.
-The 1966 election chooses governors, senators, and
congressmen.
-1966 was a significant year in American electoral history
because the Republicans had really been knocked down hard in
1964.
-Barry Goldwater. What kind of man is he?
Where did he come from?
What does he stand for?
In 1964, the Republican candidate for president was an
ultraconservative senator from Arizona.
Barry Goldwater pledged to fight communism abroad, and
crime at home.
He aimed to slash federal spending and give states
more rights to govern themselves.
-Barry Goldwater represented a change for Republicans.
-Goldwater shapes his campaign to one theory, that there is a
smothered conservative majority in America.
-They wanted to really create a stark contrast and present a more
conservative view.
-Let there be a choice.
Right now and in clear, understandable terms.
But on Election Day in 1964, Goldwater and his supporters
were dealt a crushing blow by sitting Democratic president
Lyndon Johnson.
-In the early returns from Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Connecticut,
Oklahoma, Vermont and Maryland, the senator is running
well behind the president.
-After Goldwater's landslide defeat come proclamations that the
conservative movement is dead.
And ’66 is the first electoral moment when we see that – hey,
that’s actually not true.
Just below the surface of Goldwater’s devastating defeat at
the national level was a regional trend that did not go unnoticed by
Republican Party leaders.
Of the six states that Goldwater won, all
but his home state of Arizona were located in the deep South.
-The big issue, of course, was race.
Southern conservative Democrats were dead set against
the federal government, as they would put it, imposing civil rights
on the segregationist South.
-I like to think of the ’60s was the period when Black Americans
became fully citizens in the country that they were already
citizens in.
The 1954 Brown school desegregation case set
loose an avalanche of social activism, this integrationist push.
The idea was that if Blacks and whites interacted with each other
on par, much of the discrimination and prejudice and stereotyping
that led to inequality would go away.
-These damnable proposals under the guise of so-called civil rights.
-But, for the most part, to be a Southern politician was to be
a Democrat, and to be a segregationist.
For generations, Southern politics had been dominated by a
conservative, segregationist wing of the Democratic Party, a legacy
reaching back to the Civil War, when the South sought to secede
from the country to preserve slavery.
-And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and
segregation forever.
-Within the Democratic Party, conservative Southern
segregationists had made a deal, basically, that they were O.K. with
the Democrats’ expansion of some government economic
benefits, especially ones that helped the South, as long as they
maintained support for segregation.
As the civil rights movement sought more and more progress,
there was a growing divide between conservative Southern
Democrats arguing that states should have the rights to make
their own laws, and their Northern liberal party mates.
-My fellow Americans, I am about to sign into law the Civil Rights
Act of 1964.
When President Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, signed the
sweeping Civil Rights Act after a bruising battle in Congress, an
aide recalled Johnson privately feared white Southerners would
depart for the Republican Party.
-He understood that you have progress, but
there will be a price to pay.
There will be a backlash against that.
In South Carolina, Senator Strom Thurmond, a longtime Democrat
and staunch segregationist, officially switched parties, an early
sign that change was afoot.
-I chose the Republican Party to more effectively represent the
beliefs of South Carolinians.
-In 1966, Strom Thurmond was elected as a Republican for the
first time and we do begin to see the South, parts of the solid
Democratic South, begin to break away from the Democratic Party.
The one-party South was beginning to shift.
Voters from Tennessee to Arkansas to Florida
elected their first Republicans to various political offices in nearly
100 years.
-The Republican Party is a conservative party.
The 1966 midterms also shaped the national Republican Party.
-If you look at the 1966 election, one of the really interesting
features of it is the fact that it was a kind of spawning ground for
future Republican presidents.
It was the starting point, you could
say, of the Republican presidential era that followed.
In 1966, failed Republican presidential candidate
Richard Nixon had been left for dead in American politics.
Now flexing a more conservative persona,
targeting rising crime and what he called "racial disorders" in
America’s cities, he left his home in California to campaign for
scores of G.O.P. candidates across the country.
-He credits his comeback in 1968 largely to the fact that he was an
effective campaigner for Republicans in the 1966
campaigns.
-Winning’s a lot more fun.
But the biggest story involving a California Republican in 1966 was
a Hollywood star who decided to run for governor.
-It’s time that some people were reminded that actors are people.
-Reagan was taking some of the Goldwater ideas, but presenting
them in a way that was more palatable, a cheerful demeanor,
and was much more successful, uh, as a result.
-What we begin to see then are a number of white, conservative
Democrats bolting the Democratic Party and supporting people like
Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.
They identify with conservative Republicans as
anti-big government.
After cruising to victory in 1966, in 1980 Reagan went nationwide as
the new face of American conservatism.
- ...a great national crusade to make America great again.
Traveling to Mississippi on his presidential campaign, he
promised to support states’ rights, and courted old Southern
Democrats still on the fence about voting Republican.
The writing was on the wall.
It would take decades but, by the
Reagan era, the Republicans were on their way to a solid lock
on the South.
-1966 represents an important point, but just one point on a long
scale of change.
The Democratic Party was generally liberal, but then it had
these Southern conservatives.
The Republican Party was generally conservative, but it had
these Northeastern liberals.
What has happened was this sorting out
where the South gradually became more Republican, the
Northeast gradually more Democratic.
What it meant was both parties became more
ideologically consistent.
-The parties kind of sort themselves out, and that is one
factor contributing to what we now know today as partisan
polarization.
We are still living in the world of that mid-1960s political
environment in many ways.
And we see the parties reflect aspects
of the debates from that era.