I feel like the Republican Party is headed for a 1964 moment in 13 months. The 2024 Republican Convention will be held in July ’24. It will be something.
In 1964, the party’s base was supporting the very conservative (for 1964) Sen. Barry Goldwater to run against President Lyndon Johnson. The convention was at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The party, long dominated by northeastern moderates and even liberals, was steadily being taken over by much more conservative Republicans from the South and Midwest. The favorite of the party establishment in the northeast was New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. The conservatives in the party didn’t like Rockefeller for political reasons – he was the epitome of the northeast liberal Republicans. But they also didn’t like that he had divorced his first wife and married a younger woman, which was a big thing in 1964.
At the convention, when Rockefeller gave a speech, he was booed loudly by many in the crowd. Rockefeller spoke in favor of adding an amendment to the party platform denouncing extremists, like the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. The rank-and-file were in no mood to hear that. And, in fact, Goldwater, in accepting the nomination, gave his most famous line: “Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
When I saw Pence announce his candidacy today with a denunciation of Donald Trump for Jan. 6, and his pressure on Pence over the counting of electoral votes, I thought about 1964, and what a speech by Pence at next year’s convention would look like, in an arena filled with Trump supporters. Or Chris Christie.
Actually, if Trump has the nomination sewed up by then, you likely won’t see Pence at the convention, and you sure won’t see him give a speech.