preview

The Election Between Lyndon B. Johnson And Barry Goldwater Essay

Better Essays
The 1964 American election between Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater has strong similarities with the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. In both cases, the democrat candidates focused more on their counterpart’s rhetoric rather than uphold their own ideas in an attempt to persuade voters to support them. This essay will argue that the Democrat candidates of the 1964 and 2016 elections, in many instances, instead of focusing on their political proposals, focused on anti-intellectualism by emphasizing their opponent’s extremist right-winger rhetoric. This comparison shows the enduring trends of right-wing extremism, racial conflicts, and republican divisiveness. To prove this argument, this text will analyze Democrat campaign advertisements in both campaigns, Nelson A Rockefeller speech at the 1964 National Republican convention and Jeb Bush interview to NBC.
In order to compare these two influential elections, one must first have a firm grasp of the historiography of both elections. The 1964 election was the 45th quadrennial presidential election. It had a lot of controversy around it due to the Republican nomination of politician and businessman Barry M. Goldwater for the president run. He outweighed prominent Republican candidates, for instance, Nelson A. Rockefeller. Goldwater did not have the support of his own party to run the election and underwent heavy criticism due to his unpopular conservative political position. He faced the Democrat
Get Access