United States presidential election in California, 1964

In the 1964 United States presidential election, the state of California voted for the incumbent Democratic President, Lyndon B. Johnson, in a landslide over the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

As Johnson won nationally in a massive landslide, taking 61.05 percent of the vote nationwide, and dominating many Northeastern and Midwestern states by record landslide margins, California weighed in as about 4 percent more Republican than the national average in the 1964 election. Johnson dominated in more liberal Northern California, breaking 60% in many counties and even breaking 70% in Plumas County and the city of San Francisco. However the Western conservative Goldwater, from neighboring Arizona, did hold some appeal in more conservative Southern California, where Johnson failed to break his nationwide vote average in a single county. Goldwater indeed won seven congressional districts in the south coastal area and carried two heavily populated Southern California counties, Orange County, and San Diego County, thus holding Johnson below the 60% mark statewide.

Although California has become a strongly Democratic state in recent elections, this was the only presidential election between 1952 and 1988 where the state was carried by a Democrat. Johnson is also the last Democrat to carry the counties of Calaveras, Colusa, Glenn, Inyo, Kern, Modoc and Tulare, and the last to win the majority of the vote in Butte, El Dorado, Kings, Mariposa, Siskiyou and Tuolumne counties, although one or more of Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have won a plurality in those counties.

This was the last election in which California did not register the most votes cast by state.