Goldwater Barry Jr
| 🏜️ | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 25-35 |
| Home | Phoenix, AZ |
| Demographic | small business, white, conservative |
| Lean | small_govt_conservative |
| Race | white |
A small-business owner in Phoenix in his late twenties who represents the young conservative movement of the Goldwater years. He believes the Republican Party's moderate wing is the problem, and he connects the party's old Taft-era conservatism with Reagan's later conservatism.
Who they stand for
The conservative movement of the early 1960s was young, based in the West, and well organised. Young Americans for Freedom was founded at William F. Buckley's house in 1960. National Review had argued since 1955 that the Eisenhower Republican Party accepted too much of the New Deal. F. Clifton White's campaign to draft Goldwater took control of the party's precinct and county organisations before the 1964 primaries. Its voters lived in the new suburbs of Phoenix, Orange County and Dallas. They were small business owners and engineers in the defence and aerospace industries, recent migrants to the Sun Belt with no loyalty to the party's Eastern establishment.
Goldwater defeated Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 California primary and won the nomination at the Cow Palace. He then lost to Johnson by the largest popular-vote margin recorded up to that date, carrying only six states, Arizona and five in the Deep South. What the movement kept was its organisation, and Ronald Reagan. Reagan's televised speech supporting Goldwater in October 1964 made him governor of California two years later. The John Birch Society was on the edge of this movement, and Buckley's public break with its leadership was an argument within the movement.
Playing to them
He responds well to a president who reduces the size of the federal government and takes a firm stance against the Soviet Union. This includes a tax cut without a spending increase, a veto of new programmes, a hard line in Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam, and a Supreme Court nominee who interprets the Constitution literally. He is a movement voter who judges ideological purity, so half-measures earn him little support, and an Eisenhower-style moderate Republican disappoints him almost as much as a Democrat does. He does not forgive the Great Society, an expansion of Social Security, arms talks with the Soviet Union, an initiative through the United Nations, or a president who denounces the John Birch Society while still asking for his vote. His politics are the opposite of Country Club Richard's, and a president cannot hold both wings of the party on domestic policy for long, although anti-communism appeals to both.
Winning his support costs Faculty Eleanor, Campus David, Harlem James and South Side Dorothy, who hear his constitutionalist language as an argument against civil rights enforcement, and it unsettles Union Hall Frank over Social Security. Prairie Ruth and Ranch Hand Clyde support a president alongside him.
Where they live
The five states where Goldwater Barry Jr makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Wyoming
- Montana
- Idaho
- Utah
- North Dakota