United States presidential election in Alabama, 1964

In the 1964 United States presidential election, Alabama was the only state in which the Democratic Party nominee, President Lyndon B. Johnson did not appear on the ballot, as then-Governor George Wallace did not accept his civil rights and desegregation legislation. Wallace allowed the state Democratic Party to place a set of unpledged Democratic electors on the ballot, but after planning to run for President himself (as he would do in 1968) decided against this in July and supported Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. This was the third time a winning President-elect did not appear on the ballot in Alabama, following on from Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Harry S. Truman in 1948.

Republican Barry Goldwater, viewed as a dangerous right-wing extremist in the older Northeastern heartland of the Republican Party, was thrashed there as had been uniformly predicted before the poll, with Texas Governor John Connally saying Goldwater would win only Alabama and Mississippi. Nevertheless, his opposition to the pending Civil Rights Act and Medicare plus his ability to unite white Alabamans of different classes meant Goldwater could capture the “black belt” counties that were historically the basis of Alabama’s limited-suffrage single-party politics, at a time when 77 percent of blacks still had not registered to vote. Goldwater did equally well in those Appalachia counties where Republicans had been competitive in Presidential elections even at the height of the “Solid South”. Only in the North Alabama counties of Lauderdale, Colbert, Limestone, Jackson and Cherokee – hostile to Goldwater’s proposal to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority – and in Macon County, home of Tuskegee University, did Goldwater not obtain a majority. Even with powerful opposition to TVA privatization, those northern counties voting against Goldwater did so by no more than twelve percent in Limestone County.

This was the fourth occasion when a Republican nominee carried Alabama, but the first outside of Reconstruction elections in 1868, 1872 and 1876. Despite Johnson’s landslide victory that year, winning 61.1 percent of the popular vote, the highest percentage to date, he also lost to Goldwater four other previously solidly Democratic Southern states – Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia.