Barry Goldwater Votes Against Civil Rights Act of 1964

Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater casts one of the Senate's decisive "no" votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on June 19, 1964, citing Titles II and VII as unconstitutional federal overreach. Six of the seven other Republicans who vote against the bill represent Deep South states; Goldwater represents Arizona. His opposition gives the segregationist South a credible vehicle inside the Republican Party for the first time. Goldwater wins his home state and five Deep South states in the November election — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — states LBJ carries nowhere else. Political analysts including Kevin Phillips later identify that vote and its electoral result as the founding moment of the Republican "Southern Strategy," a deliberate courtship of white voters alienated by civil rights legislation.