AHC: Barry Goldwater wins 1964 US election

I was thinking that having Goldwater win in 1964 would be an interesting challenge, partly to see conservatism rise to power earlier and partly because it was such a lopsided result that changing it would be an interesting challenge. So, your challenge, should you accept it, is with a PoD after January 20, 1961, make Barry Goldwater the winner of the 1964 US election. Go ahead!
 
I was thinking that having Goldwater win in 1964 would be an interesting challenge, partly to see conservatism rise to power earlier and partly because it was such a lopsided result that changing it would be an interesting challenge. So, your challenge, should you accept it, is with a PoD after January 20, 1961, make Barry Goldwater the winner of the 1964 US election. Go ahead!

Kennedy doesn't get assassinated and his illness and his infidelities become public sometime in 1964, and he botches the response to the revelations. Goldwater also tones down his rhetoric and picks a better running mate. A debate happens in the fall and Kennedy loses or at least does worse against Goldwater than he did against Nixon in 1960. Goldwater pulls off a VERY narrow win in 1964 and then goes on to lose in 1968 to Hubert Humphrey.
 
God discovers alcohol.

The problem is the insurmountable odds that Goldwater was facing. He was not the favorite of his own party, let alone the nation. He endorsed policies and ideology that was politically toxic in the age of the Liberal Consensus. The Right Wing existed in the 1960s, and were ... rambunctious, but they more or less kept to their own groups (some may say breathing their own air) without having much in the way of the mainstream. You could say they were like Tea Partiers in terms of their grassroots campaigning, and vitriol against Liberalism. There's a lot to compare between the Birchers and Conservatives and John Kennedy, and the Tea Party and Obama. At the same time, unlike the Tea Party, it needs to be reiterated that they were nowhere near the mainstream. That came to roost in 1964.

The problem is, how can you have a President Goldwater with the weight of the world against him. You're going to need everything that can go wrong to go wrong, and to go wrong for the Democrats, and for absolute perfection on the Republican side. But how? Kennedy's infidelities won't be reported, nor his health. For one reason, the media didn't act that way. For another, Kennedy was good at hiding it all. For another, likely most politicians and lobbyists in Washington were having affairs in the 1960s. Kennedy is considered so big because we found out about it circa 1968, before we found out about everyone else. And for another reason, John Kennedy was one of Barry Goldwater's best friends. Johnson won't be taken down by the Bobby Baker scandal. Goldwater tried. No one wanted to hear it about a sitting president.
 
Oswald manages to score one head-shot each on both Kennedy AND Johnson.

House Speaker John W. McCormack becomes acting President. After a long,
unhappy year in an office he never wanted, he announces he won't seek
re-election in 1964.

The 1964 Democratic Convention is a free-for-all. George Wallace manages
to take the nomination, despite efforts by multiple other candidates to stop him
(Sam Yorty, Albert Porter, Pat Brown, Daniel Brewster, etc. none of whom carry
any delegates outside their home states)

Given the shitty choice between Wallace and Goldwater, voters go with the
one who doesn't spew the "N" word in public.
 
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