On Starting Over

Goldwater's legacy and the future of the Democrats

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

So.

Republicans won the Senate, may win the House, kept their state legislatures, won the presidency, won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years — by 5 million votes and counting — and won across demographics, upping margins with blacks and Latinos.

After the 1963 election, John F. Kennedy famously said in a press conference, “A margin of only one vote would still be a mandate.”

Trump is currently ahead by 4.8 million votes. That’s one of the biggest margins in U.S. presidential history. He may even eclipse the 4.98 million Obama had when he beat Romney in 2012, which pundits at the time called a “landslide.”

It’s fair to say Trump has been given a mandate.

In the last 50 years, only three other Republicans have won the popular vote by so much — all during the Reagan Revolution, or Republican Realignment, of the 1980s. The seeds of that realignment began just days after Kennedy’s remark about a mandate, commenting on his own narrow presidential victory. Two weeks later, he was assassinated, and Lyndon B. Johnson went on to crush Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater’s campaign had emphasized limited government, individual freedom, and anti-communism. He lost horribly, but the mold was cast. In 1980, the year I was born, there rose a political contender for the White House who was known more as an entertainer than a powerbroker. He was a political oddball in one other way — he embraced the decades-old philosophy of a failed candidate named Goldwater.

But he won. By a lot. That entertainer was of course Ronald Regan. And the result of his victory became known as the Republican Realignment. Here’s how it went down.