1964 Republican Party presidential primaries

From February 15 to June 19, 1964, voters of the Republican Party elected 1,308 delegates to the 1964 Republican National Convention through a series of delegate selection primaries and caucuses, for the purpose of determining the party's nominee for president in the 1964 United States presidential election.

United States Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was selected as the nominee at the 1964 Republican National Convention held from July 13 to July 16, 1964, in San Francisco, California.

In 1952, Senator Robert A. Taft, a leading conservative, lost the nomination to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower's candidacy was generated by a draft by the so-called "Eastern Establishment," led by Thomas E. Dewey and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. The nomination was narrowly secured when Dewey and Lodge out-maneuvered Taft in pre-convention fights over delegate credentials. Eisenhower won the general election and was re-elected in 1956. The bitter 1952 convention, the presumption that Taft was too extreme to win the general election, and Eisenhower's re-election meant that conservative Republicans had not occupied the White House since at least 1929 or won the Republican nomination since at least 1936. The memory of 1952, the last contested Republican nomination, remained fresh in the minds of all parties as the 1964 primaries approached.

In 1960, the nomination was easily secured for Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon, who had made his name as an anti-communist Representative and Senator from California, was acceptable to all branches of the party. His only serious challenge came from Nelson Rockefeller, the free-spending Governor of New York and heir to the Rockefeller family fortune and Dewey's position as leader of the moderate party establishment. Though Rockefeller could not take the nomination himself, he could potentially marshal delegates to deny Nixon the nomination at the convention. On July 22, Nixon met Rockefeller at the latter's Fifth Avenue penthouse. After four hours of negotiations, they reached an agreement for fourteen points in the party platform, generally committing Nixon to greater spending on defense and education, opposition to racial segregation, and a flexible internationalist foreign policy. The so-called Compact of Fifth Avenue was reviled by conservatives, who unsuccessfully attempted to draft Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an occasional Eisenhower critic, as Nixon's running mate; at the convention, however, Goldwater declined to run.

Nixon narrowly lost the election to Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic elected president and a supporter of federal enforcement of equal civil rights for African Americans, performed relatively poorly in the South. While the region had been a Democratic stronghold since the end of Reconstruction, Kennedy's only convincing majority was in the state of Georgia. He lost Tennessee and Florida to Nixon and only narrowly won North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. In four more states, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, dissident members of his own party fielded independent slates of electors which refused to pledge their votes to Kennedy. Thus, despite Nixon's loss, the Republican Party entered the Kennedy administration with hopes of finding support in the South.

The earliest movements toward the 1964 nomination were made on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, against his express wishes, by a group composed mostly of Young Republicans and led by F. Clifton White, a longtime party activist from upstate New York. At a secret meeting in Chicago on October 8, 1961, White proposed that, partly thanks to the reallocation of delegates toward the conservative South and Midwest, a candidate could secure the nomination without the support of New York or New England. The group agreed to organize throughout the country and began fundraising.

In spring 1962, they leased a Manhattan office in the Chanin Building. Their address, Suite 3505, became the informal name of their campaign. Goldwater had a personal audience with White in January 1963 and urged him to drop the draft effort. Instead, the group went public as the "Draft Goldwater Committee." Headquarters were informally opened in critical states by mid-1963, and by the summer he led some opinion polls among Republicans. The New York Times reported on July 7 that a movement was underfoot in the northeast for "favorite sons" to run in state primaries to prevent a Goldwater nomination, since they feared major losses with Goldwater.

Though conservatives organized behind the unwilling Goldwater, the leading candidate for the nomination in early 1963 was Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller began to campaign around the country and was well received on a spring tour of the Midwest, though he stopped Goodwin Knight from formally establishing a California campaign office. He led most polling over Goldwater through the spring.