The Times has converted all of its 1964 issues into a digitized, searchable format. Each week, The Upshot will unearth an item from 50 years ago and put it in the light of today. “Johnson Swamps Goldwater and Kennedy Beats Keating” appeared on Nov. 3 and can be seen in its original format on TimesMachine.
Politicians, especially Democrats, smarting from the results of Tuesday’s election can take comfort in this lesson from 1964: Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Fifty years ago, of course, the Democrats scored a much greater wave than Republicans managed on Tuesday. President Lyndon B. Johnson was elected in a landslide, and Democrats emerged with majorities of 68-32 in the Senate and 295-140 in the House, far beyond what Republicans will achieve in 2014 even when all the votes are counted.
But the Republican winners and losers from that election weren’t all obvious in hindsight.
Two days after the election, The Times declared Gov. George Romney of Michigan, one of the night’s few prominent G.O.P. victors, “the probable leader of a reconstituted national Republican party.” Mr. Romney would go on to an early failure in the 1968 presidential race after declaring that he had received a “brainwashing” in Vietnam. (His son Mitt would lose the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama.)
Comeback Stories
CreditGeorge Tames/The New York Times
But other defeated Republicans would go on to victories and renown years later.
One of them was Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, described by The Times as “a Knoxville lawyer making his first run for public office.” That run was in a special Senate election to fill the seat vacated by the death of Estes Kefauver, the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential nominee.
Mr. Baker lost to the Democrat, Ross Bass, but he would win the seat two years later after Mr. Bass was defeated in a primary, and go on to serve three terms, including four years as majority leader, before retiring and later becoming President Reagan’s chief of staff.
Another resilient Republican, Charles H. Percy, failed to unseat Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois in 1964 but would also serve three terms in the Senate, starting in 1966.
Winthrop Rockefeller, a scion of the famous family, decisively lost his bid for the Arkansas governorship to the segregationist Democrat Orval Faubus, but came back to win the office two years later when Mr. Faubus stepped down.
And most of all, there was George Bush, identified by The Times only as “the son of former Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut,” who failed to unseat Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas but would later become a congressman, C.I.A. director and, ultimately, the 41st president of the United States.