(inspired by hcallega's 'The Presidency of John F Kennedy')
John F. Kennedy (Democratic)
35th President of the United States
January 20, 1961 – January 20, 1969
…following the near-death experience that he escaped in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy set out to define his legacy, placing a civil rights bill and War on Poverty on his New Frontier agenda.
As election year 1964 began, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was forced to resign in January amidst a Senate investigation into his financial dealings as Senator in the 1950s, a dramatic fall from grace despite his reputation as formerly one of the most powerful men in the country as Senate Majority Leader.
Kennedy's goal of a tax cut in exchange for promising a budget not to exceed $100 billion in 1965 was met, and Revenue Act of 1964 emerged from Congress and was signed on February 26, 1964.
Efforts to pass a civil rights bill in Congress in July 1964 failed narrowly to a filibuster despite heavy congressional efforts led by Democratic Senate leaders Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey and the Republican leader, Everett Dirksen to pass the bill. This gave President Kennedy much momentum from civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr, convincing them that civil rights would have a better chance of success in his second term as opposed to his Republican rival in the general election, conservative Senator Barry Goldwater.
After Kennedy decisively defeated Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace in the Democratic primaries, Kennedy selected outgoing North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford as his running mate at the Democratic Convention.
Despite private fears within the Kennedy campaign that Goldwater would have an opening to beat the President with an appeal to white working class voters in the North and seeing little chance of holding the Southern Democratic base over “states rights”, events in October took place. The ousting of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev by Leonid Brezhnev, China's first ever atomic bomb test, gave the Kennedy campaign new momentum, arguing that Goldwater was too volatile and extreme to be President amidst an unstable world.
On November 3, 1964, John F. Kennedy, presiding over a booming economy and widely considered to have successes in foreign policy was re-elected in a 36-state landslide and 407 electoral votes.
Kennedy/Sanford - 56.1%, 407 electoral votes
Goldwater/Morton - 43.5%, 131 electoral votes
However, the Democrats lost Senate seats in:
California (George Murphy defeated Alan Cranston, 53.3%-46.7%),
Nevada (Paul Laxalt defeated Howard Cannon, 53.8-46.2),
Ohio (Robert A Taft Jr defeated Stephen Young, 54.8-45.2) [1],
Oklahoma (Bud Wilkinson defeated Fred Harris, 56-44),
Wisconsin (Wilbur Renk defeated William Proxmire, 50.4-49.5) [2]
Tennessee (special election, Class 2: Howard Baker defeated Ross Bass, 50.7-48.8)
and
Wyoming (John Wold defeated Gale McGee, 50.6-49.4)
Democrat gains:
Maryland (Joseph Tydings defeated James Glenn Beall)
New Mexico (Joseph Montoya defeated Edwin Mechem)
Other Senate races of note:
New York (
R hold):
Kenneth Keating (R) – 48.5%
Samuel Stratton (D) – 48.4%
Tennessee (
D hold):
Albert Gore (D) – 50.3%
Dan Kuykendall (R) – 49.7%
Texas (
D hold):
Ralph Yarborough (D) – 51.8%
George Herbert Walker Bush (R) – 48.2%
(Yarborough attacked Bush as a carpetbagger and a conservative to the right of Goldwater)
89th United States Congress (1965-1967)
US Senate:
Democratic Party – 61 (-3)
Republican Party – 39 (+3)
US House of Representatives:
Democratic Party – 263 (+5)
Republican Party – 172 (-5)
Notes
1. John Glenn does not fall in the bathtub and campaigns for the Ohio Democratic Senate nomination, only to be defeated by Young in the Senate primary. Robert A Taft enters the Senate six years early.
2. Without the coattails of Johnson in OTL 1964, Wisconsin Republican candidate Wilbur Renk campaigned as a moderate and distanced himself from Goldwater. He successfully defeated William Proxmire but Proxmire would defeat him in a rematch in 1970.