I think that a better explanation of Goldwater doing so poorly in the Upper South and Appalachia is that the political and social history of those regions were not defined by slavery and the racial caste system that so obviously played
the defining role in the Deep South.
Furthermore, significant parts of the Upper South and Appalachia were not just ancestrally Democratic, but - and this is key - actually had a rich history of organized labor that not only provided the basis for voters in those areas being left-wing economically and politically (if not culturally), but provided a basis for their long-time loyalty to the Democratic Party. This loyalty, of course, was only reinforced by the New Deal and for the most part, continued until very recently. Local political traditions lasted a lot longer there than in the Deep South.
That brings me to a final point: much of the South -
especially the Deep Southern states won by Goldwater - was politically, a one-party system that was dominated by reactionary, segregationist Dixiecrat machines for over half a century (1896-1965). Note that 1965 was the year that the Voting Rights Act became law; this was after the 1964 presidential election. The fact that the election came
before the VRA but after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is significant because the segregationists who controlled Southern politics until the VRA dismantled the one-party Solid South could not just cast protest votes against LBJ themselves, but still could use their corrupt machines to skew the results in the Deep South for Goldwater. When combined with the growth of the Republican Party in the South (particularly among the white middle classes in the growing cities and suburbs) - and these Republicans were very conspicuously NOT "socially moderate Rockefeller Republican" types, lol - and the fact that black voters were still basically disenfranchised
en masse, it's not really a mystery.
The Upper South and Appalachia, in contrast, did not have these factors - certainly not to the extent that the Deep South had. The only real exception was Arkansas, but note that the Democratic Party there - like in Oklahoma and Texas, neither of which are really "Deep South" in the way that say, Alabama or Mississippi are - lasted a lot longer there as a force, particularly in state and congressional politics, than in Lower Dixie. And working class whites in Appalachia and the Upper South who either belonged to labor unions or lived in communities that had a significant union presence were certainly not about to ditch their longtime Democratic partisanship for noted anti-union, anti-New Deal Republican firebrand Barry Goldwater! Some of them may have been willing to vote for the comparatively moderate on the New Deal Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon (particularly in 1960, before he started to take advantage of the Republican Party's moving to the hard Right as exemplified by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan) but
in 1964, the hard-edged, hard-line, and not very populist Goldwater was anathema to them, especially against the very popular (at the time, and again, outside the Deep South and some wealthy white suburbs in the Sun Belt and some other parts of the country) and very populist Lyndon Johnson.
/long-winded effortpost
