Goldwater and Trump: A Much Abused Comparison

[TomSea]

Goldwater and Trump: A Much Abused Comparison
What really lies behind the mask of #NeverTrump.

 A comparison that is repeatedly made by Democrats and establishment Republicans concerns Trump’s campaign and the disastrous defeat of GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. This comparison is unfortunately more often than not abused. For example, Shermichael Singleton, a Republican consultant, in The Hill (June 7) faults Trump for replicating Goldwater’s “alienation of minority voters” from the GOP. This estrangement allegedly began when Goldwater took issue with the Public Accommodations Clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet the black vote for Republican presidential candidates had been declining for decades before Goldwater became a presidential candidate, going all the way back to the electoral victory of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

Further, despite Eisenhower’s success in winning almost 40% of black voters in 1952, running, incidentally, against a Democratic ticket with a Southern segregationist vice presidential candidate, the black vote had moved dramatically into the Democratic column before Goldwater’s crack-up. Finally, there is no evidence that Trump is doing worse among minorities than that exemplary establishment Republican Mitt Romney. Right now the Donald is polling about 15 % of the black vote, which is well beyond what Romney and McCain obtained.

It is equally silly to insist, like Erick Erickson, Guy Benson and other GOP establishmentarians, that Trump is about to lose the presidential race with a crushing defeat comparable to the one suffered by Goldwater in 1964. In that year the incumbent Lyndon Johnson won over 60% of the popular vote and more than three-quarters of the electoral vote. Goldwater was trailing Johnson by more than twenty percent through most of the campaign. Right now Trump is running only slightly behind Hillary, and the gap is likely to tighten over the next few weeks, if Trump stays on script and if his opponent becomes implicated in more scandals (which is highly likely).

The electoral catastrophe that establishment Republicans and neocon journalists don’t like to discuss is what happened to their approved candidate John McCain in 2008. McCain waged such a conflict-averse campaign and showed such fear of offending the social Left that he landed up losing conservative voters. In the popular vote McCain came the closest of any GOP presidential candidate since 1964 to Goldwater’s fiasco. He lost 58.23 % of that vote and won only 173 electoral votes. Trump would have to screw up royally in order to approach the ignominious record set by his non-extremist Republican predecessor.

Read More At: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264045/goldwater-and-trump-much-abused-comparison-paul-gottfried