ABSTRACT
Though Goldwater's defeat qualified as an electoral catastrophe, California conservatives began to extricate their movement from the debris of his campaign shortly after the election. Many of the senator's supporters no doubt agreed with the bumper sticker that proclaimed "27 million Americans can't be wrong," but that was a dubious declaration considering Johnson's 43 million votes. The Goldwater minority nonetheless could not be dismissed, especially in the Golden State. Conservatives there were heartened not only by the epiphanic Reagan speech, but by two major successes at the polls in 1964: the election of George Murphy to the U.S. Senate, and the overwhelming repeal of the highly controversial Rumford Fair Housing Act.
