29 0 64.92% 34.70% | 3,130,954 1,673,657 Start date November 3, 1964 | |
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The 1964 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania took place on November 3, 1964 throughout all 50 states and D.C., which was part of the 1964 United States presidential election. Voters chose 29 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice President.
Pennsylvania overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic nominee, President Lyndon B. Johnson, over the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater. Johnson won Pennsylvania by a margin of 30.22 percent. Apart from William Howard Taft in 1912 and George Bush senior in 1992 when third-party candidates obtained substantial minorities of the vote, Goldwater’s is easily the worst showing for a Republican in the state since that party was founded. Even relative to Johnson’s popular vote landslide, Pennsylvania came out as 7.64 percent more Democratic than the nation at-large; the only occasion under the current two-party system that the state has been more anomalously Democratic than this was in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Republican landslide when Pennsylvania came out about 10 percent more Democratic than the US at-large.
Johnson won all but four counties: the central Pennsylvania counties of Snyder and Union, which have not voted Democratic since the Civil War, northeastern border Wayne County, which has never voted Democratic since Grover Cleveland won it in 1892, and Lebanon County, which has only once voted Democratic since 1856 when Franklin Roosevelt won by 587 votes in 1936. A large bloc of Appalachia and adjacent counties in southern Pennsylvania – including Lancaster County, where Johnson’s 793-vote win is the only win by a Democrat since 1856, York County, Cumberland County and Franklin County – have never voted for a Democratic candidate since.
This was also the last occasion until Barack Obama in 2008 that the Democrats won Dauphin County, Berks County, and Chester County. Within the more typically Democratic western and eastern peripheries Johnson won over 73 percent of the vote in Greene and Fayette Counties.