1.1. Gubernatorial Motivations and Roles

Governors and gubernatorial candidates share the goals of members of Congress (MCs)—getting (re)elected, achieving policy victories, and sometimes seeking national office.Footnote ²⁴ Parties help these ambitious governors fulfill these goals. In elections, for instance, “affiliation with a party provides a candidate with, among other things, a ‘brand name,’” which “convey[s] a great deal of information cheaply” to voters.Footnote ²⁵ Parties, in short, are perhaps the most important venues through which office seekers channel their political ambitions.Footnote ²⁶

Governors’ places within the national parties are unique. Their relative autonomy is constructed through the nature of candidate-centered campaigns and constitutional design—the separation of powers and federalism. For one, they are not subject to the same pressures as MCs from legislative party leadership and many governors espouse appreciation for the autonomy inherent in being governor. Former Governor and Senator Charles Robb (VA), the first chair of the modern DGA, once noted that “I'm not a legislator at heart, I loved being governor.”Footnote ²⁷ Additionally, “Because state politicians can build a career with only a fraction of the nation's constituents—and only rarely a representative fraction—they have strong incentives to diverge from their own national party leaders and platforms when it serves their political purposes.”Footnote ²⁸ In short, gubernatorial independence is valued and asserted in terms of partisan politics. Many governors, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, for instance, were instrumental in attacking traditional party organizations beginning in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

1.2. The Deep Historical Roots of National Gubernatorial Activism: Emboldened State Executives, Cooperative Federalism, and a Nationalizing Party System

By the early 1960s, governors found that the traditional party system was no longer adequate for them to advance their goals. On this front, three developments, taken together, were critical—augmented importance within state politics, increased presence within intergovernmental relations, and diminished status within the national party-as-organization.

First, governors were generally becoming more powerful within state politics, including party politics, a trend which, onto itself, should have empowered the governors within the traditional decentralized party system. Governors emerged as the leaders of state parties rather than creatures of them. Students of the American governorship often look at the early twentieth century as a period of weak chief executives, a pattern rooted in an American political tradition that viewed executive power with a deep-seated suspicion.Footnote ²⁹ Yet, beginning in the late nineteenth century reformers promoted executive leadership at all levels of government to correct for the ills of the Gilded Age—requiring rational, systematic, and coordinated public policy as well as a robust vision of rhetorical leadership. For instance, the governors’ ability to veto legislation became nearly universal by 1960. By 1950, only ten of the then forty-eight states did not grant governors budget-making authority.Footnote ³⁰ Gubernatorial staffs and their levels of professionalization increased during the 1950s.Footnote ³¹Additionally, as noted in the Council of State Governments’ 1959 Book of the States, there was a heightened “extent to which Governors have taken the initiative in proposing administrate reorganization.”Footnote ³²

The enhancement of formal gubernatorial powers was coupled with a liberation of the governor from state party organizations. By 1960, gubernatorial primaries were used in almost every state and patronage, while far from extinct, had fallen significantly from its heyday in the nineteenth century. The decline of patronage, Sabato notes, was “a boon for governors, since it has liberated them from a tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating chore that is outmoded in the modern political system. At the same time the governor has gained appointive powers where it really matters, at the top-level in policy-making positions.”Footnote ³³ These trends promoted gubernatorial name recognition among the electorate. Hopkins notes that during the 1950s and 1960s, over 80 percent of Americans could identify their governor, which was 20 percentage points higher than in the mid-2000s.Footnote ³⁴ Fewer governors, particularly outside of the South, found themselves in truly “organized” parties at the state level in the Jacksonian sense. Rather, governors were increasingly active in policy formation.

Second, governors had become consistently involved in intergovernmental politics. This began during the Progressive Era and was extended during and after the Great Depression.Footnote ³⁵ Cooperative federalism tightened the relationship between the national and state governments. States became avenues for the national government to achieve public policy goals. State governments also needed federal financial resources, which became much more significant during and after the New Deal, a trend that was sustained across Democratic and Republican administrations. Robertson, summarizing data from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, notes that the share of federal outlays, in the form of grants to state and local governments, increased from under 2 percent in 1945 to approximately 7 percent in 1960.Footnote ³⁶ Ultimately, states became involved in the joint financing and/or implementation of such programs as unemployment, welfare, Social Security, and disability insurance.Footnote ³⁷ Governors, as the heads of the executive branch and therefore the administrations in the states, had ample reason to engage in discussions over intergovernmental policy.

Governors also had institutionalized, though formally non- or bipartisan, venues for engaging with national political elites. Perhaps most significantly, the NGC, founded in 1908 at the behest of President and former New York governor Theodore Roosevelt to deal with conservation efforts, brought governors together with members of the national administration and congressional leadership.Footnote ³⁸ These interactions became routine in part thanks to the regularity of these meetings, first annually and then twice a year. Ultimately, NGC meetings provided the governors with three audiences: each other, national political elites, and the public.

Governors also became active in a series of congressional and presidential commissions created to grapple with intergovernmental issues.Footnote ³⁹ Like the NGC, these groups were formally bipartisan. In 1953, for instance, Congress created the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. In a retrospective on the commission, member William Anderson wrote, “The two major parties secured a fairly proportionate distribution of strength, but this did not mean that questions were decided upon party lines. Indeed, except for a small amount of off-the-record and lunch-time ribbing there was little or no mention of partisanship.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet, seeds for future partisan bickering were planted. Eisenhower, as McDowell notes, “believed that the federal government had been expanding into too many functions of government that belonged to the state and local governments.”Footnote ⁴¹ In fact, Eisenhower's call for the commission was at the suggestion of conservative stalwart and former rival Robert Taft. Additionally, controversy arose over the first chair of the commission, Dr. Clarence E. Manion, who came under fire from liberal groups, including Americans for Democratic Action, after a series of television appearances during which he noted his belief that the federal government had become too powerful.Footnote ⁴² Manion was replaced by Meyer Kestnbaum, who largely advocated for a more moderate approach to intergovernmental relations than Manion.Footnote ⁴³ Thus, competing visions of intergovernmental relations were present even as formal membership in these organizations remained bipartisan and largely congenial.

Third, by the 1960s governors found themselves in a precarious position in terms of national party organizations, especially national conventions where traditional means of state parties to affect national party decision making were on the wane.Footnote ⁴⁴

Changes to the party system here reflected the rise of more nationalized and programmatic parties, ones in which issue activists and candidates could play increasingly important roles in the formation of party images. One line of scholarship has emphasized a “decline” in American political parties rooted in the rise of candidate-centered campaigns, an emerging breed of partisan activists, and the weakening of the traditional party-as-organization.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Milkis has demonstrated, “the New Deal's institutional legacy made political accountability newly problematic in the United States. Administrative aggrandizement came at the expense of the more decentralizing institutions of constitutional government, such as Congress and local governments, which political parties had organized into effective representative bodies.”Footnote ⁴⁶

These changes had important ramifications for the governors’ standing in the national parties. One manifestation of this change concerned the rise of candidate-centered elections at the presidential level and the roles of state-level politicians within the nomination process. As Shafer notes, in the mid-twentieth century, the national convention was transforming from “an institutional mechanism to institutional arena.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The traditional use of the convention, arriving at a consensus over the presidential nominee, gave way to an emphasis on providing a means of articulating a coherent party message. Televising the conventions and broader changes to the presidential selection process altered the roles of party elites within nomination contests.

The implementation of primary elections in presidential contests curbed the extent to which governors could control delegates from their states. The binding of delegates in primary contests circumvented the influence of governors even as they became the de facto heads of state parties. The use of outsider strategies allowed presidential candidates to make the case that they had developed attachments to voters that went beyond traditional partisanship—that which developed through connections between voters and state and local party organizations. Presidential primaries, hence, undercut the abilities of governors to act as “insiders” within national conventions.Footnote ⁴⁸ While governors could endorse candidates and lend support to their campaigns, they could not always directly control state delegations to national conventions.

Thus, while gubernatorial authority at the state level and their involvement in national politics was on the rise, governors simultaneously found themselves in an evolving party system with elections becoming increasingly candidate-centered, enhancing gubernatorial autonomy within the states but not in the national parties. These trends allowed for tensions to arise between governors and members of the national parties.

1.3. Race Relations, Governors, and the Parties: Moderate and Relatively Unified Republicans, Divided Democrats

Civil rights politics in the early 1960s made these the tensions vivid, exacerbating differences between and among state and national party programs, including the positions taken by governors, and demonstrating an expanded role in the national state determining policy that had for decades been left to the states. Civil rights also threatened the electoral coalitions that governors had put together within their states. Republican governors at the time were, by and large, relatively moderate on the issue, while Democratic governors had much more disparate views. Thus, increased national attention to and action on the issue promoted governors within both parties to act, but Republicans moved first, more forcefully, and more innovatively, even as both parties remained divided on the issue.

The reemergence of civil rights on the national stage was rooted in longstanding migration patterns and increasing social movement activism, which had differential effects among the states.Footnote ⁴⁹ Presidential actions and judicial decisions contributed to civil rights being thrust into the national spotlight. President Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, created a new civil rights unit in the Justice Department and issued Executive Order 8802, establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee. President Truman, in signing Executive Order 9981, set the stage for the desegregation of the armed forces. The Brown v. Board of Education decision opened the door to federal enforcement of national standards within the states, and President Eisenhower ultimately enforced the decision and signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. All these actions implicated state politics and policies.

Leading into the 1960s, both parties were split over civil rights, but this divide manifested differently between the parties’ governors.Footnote ⁵⁰ Republican governors tended to be moderates from outside the South.Footnote ⁵¹ In fact, Republicans won their first Southern gubernatorial seat in over forty years in 1966 when Winthrop Rockefeller (R-AR) captured 54 percent of the vote.Footnote ⁵² Further, the ranks of the GOP governors reflected the party's status as the national minority party.Footnote ⁵³ GOP governors numbered only sixteen after the 1960 elections (see Tables 2 and 3 and Figure 1). Moreover, several ambitious and high-profile governors at the time have been identified with the Modern Republican faction of the GOP, which, as DiSalvo notes, “were primarily a pragmatic and strategic faction that did not seek to fully revamp the party intellectually, but rather only to smooth its rough edges.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Fig. 1. Governors by Party, 1960–1968.

Table 2. Party Control of Statehouses, 1960–1968

Source: Jerrold Rusk, A Statistical History of the American Electorate (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2001), tbl. 7.5, p. 447.

Table 3. Democratic Percentage of the Two-Party Vote in Gubernatorial Elections by Region by Two-Year Election Cycle (South vs. Non-South)

Source: Jerrold Rusk, A Statistical History of the American Electorate (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2001), tbl. 7.7, p. 454.

Moreover, Republican governors had been pivotal in national nominating convention politics in the New Deal era. Since 1940, Modern Republicans, including several prominent governors, had been critical in the selection of the GOP's presidential nominees (e.g., Governor Thomas Dewey, NY, and Eisenhower), but their influence came mainly through control of state delegations at the convention.Footnote ⁵⁵ As late as 1960, Rockefeller successfully pushed Nixon to adopt several progressive platform planks, including an affirmation of the party's stand on civil rights, a negotiation that became known as the “Treaty of Fifth Avenue,” but conservatives, including Goldwater, labeled it “the ‘Munich’ of the GOP.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The story of the Democratic governors is far more complicated with the diversity of views made possible by a federalism that was quite dramatic in terms of divides across the platforms of state parties and between state party platforms and that of the national party. The party's Southern wing was distinct from the rest of the party, and Southern Democratic governors tended to be much more conservative than their non-Southern counterparts on civil rights issues.Footnote ⁵⁷

In truth, the gap between the Southern and Northern wings of the party had widened. As Schickler notes, “Advocates for moving the Democratic Party in the liberal direction on civil rights found some of their earliest success at the state level in the North, where locally rooted politicians had much less reason to worry about placating southern Democrats.”Footnote ⁵⁸ “The federal nature of the American party system,” he continues, “allows intraparty divisions to be institutionalized: Northern state parties accommodated one set of groups and interests, while Southern parties provided a home for a sharply opposed set of interests.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This shift toward more liberal state parties had implications for gubernatorial nominations. In 1948, for instance, liberals in Michigan successfully nominated New Dealer G. Mennen Williams who, once elected governor, advocated for ending discrimination in the state's National Guard.Footnote ⁶⁰

Changes to national convention politics, especially the elimination of the two-thirds rule in 1936, empowered Northern liberals at the expense of Southern conservatives, and this transition began to be reflected in the national party platforms with a more progressive stand on civil rights emerging after 1936.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1940, for instance, the platform noted that the party “shall continue to strive for complete legislative safeguards against discrimination in government service and benefits, and in the national defense forces. We pledge to uphold due process and the equal protection of the laws for every citizen, regardless of race, creed or color.”Footnote ⁶² Four years later, the party argued, “We believe that racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop and vote equally with all citizens and share the rights that are guaranteed by our Constitution. Congress should exert its full constitutional powers to protect those rights.”Footnote ⁶³

In 1948, the split between the ascendant liberal wing of the party and the Southern conservatives resulted in the “Dixiecrats,” led by then Governors Strom Thurmond (SC) and Fielding Wright (MS), bolting the convention. Thurmond won four Southern states and the connection between states’ rights and conservatism on civil rights was clear. Moreover, the weakening of the Southern wing of the Democratic party within national convention politics allowed the distinction between the national party and individual state parties to become manifest. The 1948 party platform took perhaps the most forceful progressive stance on civil rights that the party had yet taken:

By the 1960s, the stand of the national party in favor of civil rights hardened. President Kennedy ultimately pushed forward on efforts to pass national civil rights legislation. President Lyndon Johnson attacked the issue much more rigorously, culminating in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and later the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

In sum, most Republican governors remained moderate on civil rights but were beginning to lose influence within the party to conservative activists while a sharp rift remained within the Democratic party's governors. The national Democratic party was moving left on the issue, but state parties’ stands, including those of the party's governors, remained divergent. Disagreement among the governors and between governors and national party elites would be channeled through party structure.

2.1. 1964: Civil Rights, Barry Goldwater, and the Denver Declaration

Outside of the NGC, efforts to build the RGA were driven by concerns over the national party brand within the 1964 election and the inadequacies of traditional means of state party leaders to influence convention politics. Rockefeller, along with other moderate Republican governors, worried that Goldwater's candidacy would tarnish the national party's standing but, unlike in previous nomination contests, failed to block the insurgent candidacy. This led to the governors issuing the Denver Declaration in which they called for the party to recognize their leadership qualities and intimate ties with state electorates.

As noted above, by the early 1960s, the national partisan scripts on civil rights had flipped. President Kennedy proposed federal legislation in the summer of 1963, and Lyndon Johnson saw the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act in July of 1964. While most congressional Republicans supported the legislation, Goldwater voted against the law, rooting his opposition in concerns over states’ rights, and his nomination brought the national party's stand on the issue into conflict with those of several Republican governors.Footnote ⁷⁵

Goldwater's conservative allies had begun to organize and targeted elements of the party-as-organization. As Tulis and Mellow note, “Goldwater's reluctant leadership energized conservative activists to build an organizational infrastructure outside of the mainstream Republican Party that had the capacity not only to sustain itself beyond his defeat but to become a force with which to be reckoned.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, the conservative movement found expression in the creation of organizations outside the formal Republican Party. A number of college students organized Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, challenging the eastern establishment and supporting Goldwater's campaign.Footnote ⁷⁷

Goldwater allies also found expression in party auxiliary committees, including the College and Young Republicans, which, throughout the 1960s, were active in get-out-the-vote efforts for the party. In January 1964, for instance, Rockefeller gave a speech before a Young Republicans convention, which, while generally received well, did not sway members of the group away from the Arizona senator. A split among the delegates at the convention was most visible when Rockefeller touted his support of a federal civil rights law, with Southern Goldwater supporters not partaking in applause.Footnote ⁷⁸

Conservatives viewed the governors’ organization with suspicion. RNC Chairman Miller, later Goldwater's running mate, noted that the RGA could provide the GOP “organizational muscle” in state and local elections, but Goldwater supporters and advocates for the “Southern strategy” viewed the strong civil rights stand taken by the GOP governors with misgiving.Footnote ⁷⁹ For instance, conservatives in Congress saw Representative Fred Schwengel's meeting with GOP governors in Miami to discuss minority staffing in the House as an intrusion on the congressional party's territory. The Ripon Society went as far as accusing Miller of attempting to persuade congressional party leaders to avoid a governors’ meeting in Denver in 1963.Footnote ⁸⁰ A national organization providing a mouthpiece to the likes of Rockefeller, Romney, and Hatfield represented a challenge to the party's conservative wing, which had a greater representation in Congress than among the party's governors.

The governors’ desire to shape the party grew during the 1964 presidential contest as efforts to block Goldwater failed. Goldwater's nomination signaled the declining influence of the party's moderates, who could not block the Arizonan's nomination, especially through control of state delegations. General Lucius Clay, who had supported Eisenhower's candidacy in 1952, argued that “the sheer lack of anybody doing anything has got us where we are. It's a good lesson in how not to select a president.”Footnote ⁸¹ This marked a drastic shift from previous Republican conventions. In 1964, there were only sixteen GOP governors, three of whom—Tim Babcock (MT), Paul Fannin (AZ), and Henry Belmon (OK)—staunchly supported Goldwater. The lack of numbers was especially detrimental to a proposal by Governors Love and Elmer Anderson (KS) to change convention voting procedures allowing delegates to vote in secret, thereby freeing “weak-kneed” delegates from the pressures of Goldwater loyalists.Footnote ⁸² The proposal was rejected by voice vote in committee.

Moderates also lacked a clear alternative to Goldwater. Rockefeller entered several primaries but drew nearly a million fewer votes than the Arizona senator. Romney used an NGC meeting in Cleveland, a month before the GOP convention, as a venue to lambast Goldwater but did not enter the race at that point. Scranton emerged as a late challenger after meeting with Eisenhower in Gettysburg. However, Ike never publicly endorsed Scranton, seeking to stay above the fray of factional politics.Footnote ⁸³ Ultimately, Goldwater's first-ballot nomination with 883 of 1308 delegates and his acceptance speech signaled that conservatives had captured the party. Goldwater was speaking directly to the moderates when he said, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”Footnote ⁸⁴

In sum, in 1964 the governors failed in using traditional means of influencing the selection of the nominee—credentials contests and control of state delegations. Goldwater's organization and his success in primaries demonstrated the governors’ weaknesses. Their elevated place within state party organizations was insufficient to block the Arizonan's nomination, and even their unprecedented level of participation at the convention as delegates did little to alter the outcome of the race (See Figure 2).

Fig. 2. Gubernatorial Participation at National Conventions as Delegates by Party, 1900–1976.

The tension that emerged between the Goldwater conservatives and the Rockefeller Republicans was not resolved before the general election. A so-called Unity Conference was held in Hershey in August. The attendees included Goldwater, Miller, new RNC Chairman Dean Burch, Eisenhower, Nixon, several governors, and MCs.

Goldwater sought to fight off the notion that he was an extremist. The view that his candidacy could hurt the party was deeply tied to Goldwater's stance on civil rights. Goldwater promised “faithful execution” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.Footnote ⁸⁵ Romney argued that Goldwater's stand was lukewarm, overly legalistic, and failed to convey a clear moral stand. Rockefeller questioned Goldwater on his apparently tacit acceptance of Ku Klux Klan support, noting “you [Goldwater] don't seek their support, but you don't reject their support. And it can very well be said by smart editorial writers that they don't seek it, but they don't say they won't accept it.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The issue of Goldwater's relationship with the traditional party apparatus was also discussed, with Rockefeller raising the matter of Citizens for Goldwater organizations circumventing state parties. Rocky noted that “the county chairmen are calling now increasingly about the organization of the Citizens for Goldwater and other Goldwater organizations in their counties; that they are not being consulted as to the membership or the leadership of committees and they don't know to whom to talk. Many of the people who are leading these organizations locally are the ones who have fought the organization.”Footnote ⁸⁷ He added that the Conservative Party of New York, which backed Goldwater, ran over fifty candidates for statewide and local offices, diminishing the GOP's chances of success down-ballot.Footnote ⁸⁸ Goldwater's supporters were operating outside the state party organizations and were, thus, outside the sphere of influence of Republican governors. Goldwater's candidacy highlighted the factional divide among party elites and the increased ease by which these conflicts could circumvent existing party infrastructure. That is, Goldwater's campaign illustrated that the traditional decentralized party organization did not empower governors within the broader national party.

Nixon called for unity and noted that the governors could be strategic assets for the national party: “We hope to have right in this room several Governors who are not coming up for election, who can be very helpful. Governor Scranton has a national reputation. Rocky has a national reputation. We have several others in that category. Use them. And I think this supplement will take some of the burden off our national candidates so that they can concentrate where they are needed, concentrate in those States, the swing States, to win.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In Nixon's eyes, what made the governors powerful was not their place within state party organizations but their reputation among voters at the national level.

Goldwater's loss (in which he won just 6 percent of the nonwhite vote, 26 percentage points less than Nixon's in 1960) precipitated renewed conversation about the party's national brand, and the relative electoral strength of the governors gave them reason for believing their approach within their respective states should be adopted nationally.Footnote ⁹⁰ As Heersink notes, “Who within the national minority party decides what groups the [national] committee targets is a product of the party's electoral performance.”Footnote ⁹¹ In this case, the magnitude of Goldwater's loss had, at least temporarily, discredited the conservative stalwart, and the relative success of some GOP governors served as vindication for their right to shape the party in the lead-up to the 1966 midterms and the 1968 presidential election. Republicans netted one pickup in gubernatorial seats with several high-profile governors reelected by respectable margins, including Romney, John Chafee (RI), and Daniel Evans (WA). As Smylie noted, “we are a leaderless party because no one has earned the right to that leadership by winning an election.”Footnote ⁹²

Governors sought to fill a perceived leadership void and did so through organizational developments and by attempting to shape the party program. After the election, Romney wrote a sternly worded letter to Goldwater in which he argued that “the party's need to become more broadly inclusive and attractive should be obvious to anyone.”Footnote ⁹³ He went on to argue that Goldwater was complicit in extremist attempts to infuse racial conservatism into the platform, noting that “a leading Southern delegate in private discussion with me, opposing my civil rights amendment after it was introduced but before it was offered, made it clear there had been a platform deal that was a surrender to the Southern segregationists, contrary to the entire tradition of the party. And it appeared that there was a willingness to accept, perhaps even welcome, the support of irresponsible extremists such as those you clearly reject in the December 21, 1964, U.S. News interview.”Footnote ⁹⁴

At a December 1964 meeting in Denver, Republican governors drafted and unanimously agreed upon formal Articles of Association and issued the “Denver Declaration.” In the Declaration, the seventeen governors and governors-elect argued that “the 1964 election made it abundantly clear that national party policies have momentous impact on the ability of the Republican Party to win elections within the States. Republican governors, therefore, have a clear-cut duty to participate with other leaders of the Party in formulating positive policies with broad appeals to bring before all the American people.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In the final analysis, conflict within the NGC (between the parties) and the 1964 election (within the GOP) hastened the party's governors to find new means of asserting themselves more vigorously in national partisan affairs. The RGA provided a means to this end.

4.1. The RGA as National Party Organization: Serving the Governors

The RGA provided electoral services to governors and gubernatorial candidates, publicized its membership's accomplishments, critiqued opponents, and coordinated its members’ activities in national party affairs. The organization created new roles for the governors within the party. The governors agreed to the RGA having an executive committee, including the chairman, elected annually, and at least two other sitting governors. The chairperson served as a national spokesperson who addressed national conventions and was tasked with bringing the party's governors together. Smylie was reelected to the position. The chairmanship has been held by several prominent governors, including Ronald Reagan from 1968 to 1970 (see Table 4).

Table 4. RGA and DGC/DGA Chairmen and Later National Political Careers

Additionally, a policy committee, which issued policy papers and resolutions, and a gubernatorial campaign committee, which aided gubernatorial and state legislative candidates, were established. Though the initial staff was small, the RGA reached out to academics, including political scientists Robert Huckshorn and Cornelius Cotter, in filling these positions.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Walter Devries was tapped to lead campaign school sessions on winning over independent voters.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By 1966, the RGA had a full-time executive director, a public relations officer, and a research coordinator. The organization's staff included political operatives who had worked for other Republican organizations. Richard Fleming, who became executive director in 1967, had worked for the RNC's research division. The staffing of the organization, thus, built on preexisting GOP networks.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The group instituted seminars for gubernatorial candidates, circulated RNC-sponsored research on congressional redistricting, and had its own suite, with RNC-provided staff, at Republican conventions.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Smylie noted during one of the campaign “schools” in Denver that this was “the first time I think in the history of either political party in the United States to coordinate and to be of some assistance on a national basis to gubernatorial candidates in the several states.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These seminars set a precedent for the organization contributing to governors becoming national party builders.

Further, the Articles of Association called for semiannual meetings of the governors, which would develop comradery and provide opportunities to engage with national party leaders. The meetings were almost always attended by the RNC chairperson, congressional leadership, and, later, members of GOP presidential administrations. During the mid-1960s, the RGA held at least two meetings per year in addition to confabs during NGC meetings. The meetings became media events in themselves, elevating the governors’ national media profiles.

4.2. Seeking Influence and National Party Success: The RGA, the RNC, and the RCC

Through the RGA, the governors sought to expand their influence over the national party and rooted their arguments in the significant party losses of 1964. Several efforts centered on changing elements of the national party organization, including the leadership of the RNC and the activities of party auxiliary committees. In doing so, the governors asserted themselves not just within state party organizations but also within national party organizations.

Studies of party-building efforts, including those by Klinkner, Galvin, and Heersink, have emphasized electoral loss as a key motivating factor for organizational investments and rebuilding and rebranding efforts.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Republican losses in 1964 were substantial, and GOP voters seemed to cast some blame on Goldwater and his allies. A Gallup poll conducted shortly after the election, for instance, found that, 20 percent of GOP voters said the party should move in a more moderate direction, while just 8 percent said the party should move or stay to the right. Further, 32 percent of GOP voters suggested that the GOP change the party's leadership, and 20 percent called for more party unity.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The governors built on these sentiments, and the RGA became a venue through which they exerted some influence over national party organizational affairs, often in partnership with other like-minded individuals in the party.

GOP governors attempted to wrestle control of the RNC from Goldwater and Burch. They joined Senator Thruston Morton (KY) in calling for Burch to be replaced. Even Eisenhower argued that in attempting to keep Burch, Goldwater “desires to read out of the party counsels nearly all the Republican governors. I am convinced that this is not an effort to create unity, but merely an insistence on personal control by the Goldwater cabal.”Footnote ¹¹¹

The 1964 Denver RGA meeting was a repudiation of Goldwater and Burch.Footnote ¹¹² Leading RGA figures promoted ousting Burch ahead of an RNC meeting in January. Smylie sent a letter to members of the RNC, arguing that the Denver Declaration provided “a foundation on which the Party can rebuild toward a substantial victory in 1966.”Footnote ¹¹³ Scranton, in a letter to Eisenhower, noted that “if the Goldwater group believes that they do not have the votes to keep Burch by the time January 22nd comes around, I believe that a ‘nice way’ of arranging Burch's resignation could be worked out before the meeting, but if the pressure lets up between now and then, I believe they will try to retain him on some plan or other, or at least try to continue to control the National Committee.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Burch expressed his intent to stay: “I am not staying on simply because Senator Goldwater wants me to stay. And I'm not staying on because Governor Smylie wants me to go.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Burch endorsed the Denver Declaration but focused his support on the formation of a campaign committee.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Ultimately, Bliss, the chairman of the Ohio State Republican Party, who, as Conley notes, “believed that developing a ‘sound organization,’ and electing Republicans, offered the most reliable means of ensuring that the party and its conservative policies remained viable,” was selected as the next chairman.Footnote ¹¹⁷ “National party leadership, on the whole,” Conley continues, “despite itself being divided by the deepening liberal and conservative schism within the party, chose party unity over continued internal ideological warfare.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted that “the goal [was] not so much party unity as party growth.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The relationship between Bliss and the RGA proved to be symbiotic. Bliss granted the RGA office space within RNC headquarters and, after the 1966 midterms, expanded the RNC's expenditures for the RGA, offering $100,000 a year as an operating budget.Footnote ¹²⁰ This more than doubled previous RGA outlays and allowed the group to expand its staff, open its own headquarters, and replicate its campaign schools in 1968.Footnote ¹²¹ Bliss, thus, invested in the RGA and state parties while promoting a national party image that allowed for active gubernatorial leadership capable of expanding the base of the party at the state level.Footnote ¹²²

Certain governors also became active in leadership contests within party auxiliary committees, demonstrating that the governors’ attention to the national party organization at large. For instance, the Rockefeller brothers and Romney actively promoted the election of moderate Gladys O'Donnell over Phyllis Schlafly for the leadership of the National Federation of Republican Women in 1967.Footnote ¹²³ Schlafly had backed Goldwater in 1964.

The governors also promoted establishing a Republican Leadership Council, which ultimately led to the creation of the RCC. The RCC was created to develop new policy proposals, and the governors sought to make sure that their policies were not overshadowed by the congressional wing of the party. Governors were given five slots on the committee and sent Smylie, Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton, and Love as their representatives.Footnote ¹²⁴ The governors’ delegation to the RCC was expanded to eight the following year. The delegation had a distinctively moderate bent, and all the original gubernatorial participants, except for Smylie, were often touted as presidential or vice-presidential contenders.

The RCC's establishment was not unprecedented in American party history. In fact, the GOP was acutely aware of the Democratic Advisory Council when the group was formed. For our purposes, the inclusion of governors, and their emphatic desire to participate, in the RCC is telling. Karl Lamb has illustrated that gubernatorial involvement in previous GOP national party-building efforts had been uneven and often meager. The Ogden-Mills Commission, formed in 1919, drew less than 10 percent of its 173 members from state and local government officials. The Glenn Frank Committee, established during the New Deal, included only three state and local elected officials. The Mackinac Conference was exceptional by including the twenty-four GOP governors elected in 1942. The Percy Commission, established with the blessing of Eisenhower, included only four members of state and local government out of forty-three spots.Footnote ¹²⁵

The governors’ inclusion in the RCC was largely welcome, but some within the party did not want them to dominate the group. Everett Dirksen, for instance, argued: “The only elected Republican officials of the Federal Establishment are the 32 Republican members of the United States Senate and the 140 members of the House of Representatives. Obviously and beyond dispute, they will guide Republican Party policy at the national level, in the absence of a Republican President and Vice President, by the record they write in the Congress. It is their responsibility.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The governors were to be “an additional repository of advice.”Footnote ¹²⁷

Klinkner notes that the RCC “provided an internal forum for discussion between party factions and thereby helped to unify a badly divided party” and “produced a steady flow of reports and statements spelling out constructive, if not exciting, Republican positions on the issues and criticisms of the Johnson administration.”Footnote ¹²⁸ He goes on to argue that “the mortal wounds of the liberal and moderate Republicans were less apparent than they have become in hindsight” and that “an organizational response was the best they could hope for given their diminished influence.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Nevertheless, the governors’ participation in the RCC tightened their place within the national party.

While much of the party's gains in the 1966 midterm elections are attributable to LBJ's declining popularity, Vietnam, and the emerging urban crisis, GOP gubernatorial success was broad based. The party made gains in the South and the West, and it held seats in the Northeast. While Reagan was elected in California, several moderates, including Winthrop Rockefeller (AR) and David Cargo (NM), were also elected. Two years later, Robert Ogilvie (I) and Robert Ray (IA), both moderates, were elected in competitive races. In sum, the governors remained an ideologically broad group during this period, and several governors benefitted from the party-building efforts of the RNC and the RGA in 1966.

4.3. The RGA and the NGC: Republican Governors Acting as Part of a National Team

After 1964, RGA activities within NGC meetings emphasized party-branding efforts. The GOP governors highlighted their disagreements with LBJ and the Democratic Congress and emphasized the policy successes they had in the states. In this way, the RGA underscored the distinctiveness of Republican governors from the national Democratic Party, despite the moderate bent of many GOP governors at the time. The RGA's role in the NGC is the clearest manifestation of the party's role in promoting a national form of partisanship.

The formation of the RGA did not result in formal changes to the NGC's constitution or bylaws. It did, however, contribute to partisanship structuring the processes by which the organization operated. For instance, at the end of the 1965 meeting in Minneapolis, and for the first time in NGC history, the nominating committee for officers issued two reports—one from each party. Governor Brown lamented, “There never, to my knowledge, has ever been any move to amend these Articles of Organization by providing that the Republican Governors shall caucus and the Democratic Governors shall caucus and then the Nominating Committee shall just be a tool of the respective political caucuses of the political parties. It seems to me that the thing that is really fraught with danger is the use of this great Conference for the purpose of some political advantage to either one party or the other.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The NGC had developed into “a forum for the heated discussion of national programs and federal-state relations,” and now had clear partisan demarcations.Footnote ¹³¹

This was true even in discussing foreign affairs. In 1965, Democrats asked for the NGC to issue a statement supporting remarks made by the president in a televised speech that occurred during the annual meeting. Romney, generally supportive of liberal internationalism, worried that using the conference in this way would bolster support for the Democrats.Footnote ¹³² Governor Burns, a Democrat (FL), responded by noting that “at this time that all partisanship must be laid aside and that a word of patriotism must be substituted. We have elected through the democratic processes a leader for this nation. I think that it behooves the people of this nation, certainly the Governors of this nation, to stand as one, united, in support of the action that has been announced on behalf of this nation. We as Governors are not informed in the field of diplomacy nor are we informed of the give and take at the negotiation table. We, like every other citizen of these United States, have our allegiance to the nation and to its leadership.”Footnote ¹³³

Partisan discourse also emerged over the issue of Vietnam. Smylie criticized LBJ's Southeast Asia policy on the television show, Your Right to Say It.Footnote ¹³⁴ Love, elected RGA chairman in 1966, traveled to Vietnam and announced support for U.S.-led bombing campaigns and the blockade of the North Vietnam port of Haiphong, and he went as far as to say that “the ultimate answer” for the conflict “has to be political.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Romney also traveled to Vietnam, though his visit proved detrimental to his presidential ambitions. James Foster noted that “the war is a political issue. Any public figure who can identify himself with any degree of expertise on Vietnam stands to gain political mileage.”Footnote ¹³⁶

The RGA also acted as a mouthpiece on behalf of GOP governors outside of the NGC. For instance, it issued a statement supporting the ratification of the 24th Amendment, touting the fact that states with GOP-controlled legislatures were much more supportive of the prohibition of poll taxes than were states controlled by Democrats and criticizing President Johnson for opposing previous attempts to eliminate the practice.Footnote ¹³⁷ The RGA also publicly condemned the activities of Democratic operative Bobby Baker, who was then being investigated for bribery by the Senate.Footnote ¹³⁸

LBJ's domestic policies also came under fire. Chafee, in a speech celebrating Lincoln's birthday, argued that the Great Society treated individuals as “economic units” who were “to be escorted from poverty by the grace and charity of a fatherly federal government.”Footnote ¹³⁹ He also took on LBJ on crime, noting GOP gubernatorial leadership on the issue, including that of Rockefeller who had called for five times the increase in police ranks in New York City than did the president.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The governors also responded directly to LBJ's 1968 State of the Union address. Chafee led a press conference separate from that held by the congressional wing of the party.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Several others attacked the president's seemingly bloated budget.Footnote ¹⁴²

In the final analysis, the RGA fostered the governors’ involvement in party-branding activities, allowing them to draw distinctions with policies stemming from Washington, particularly those of President Johnson. In doing so, the governors often pointed to potential alternatives developed within the states. Fiscal conservatism and active agendas on crime were issues that the governors emphasized and became important parts of the Republican Party's agenda, at the state and the national levels, over the coming decades. The RGA's branding activities within and beyond the NGC are perhaps the clearest and earliest means by which the organization contributed to national partisan polarization.

4.4. The RGA at the 1968 Convention: Platform and the Convention as Spectacle

In the 1968 presidential election, governors mobilized in a fundamentally new way—one that emphasized the importance of party program, the leadership qualities of the governors, and the power of collective action over traditional roles as delegate brokers. That is, gubernatorial activity at the convention, coordinated through the RGA, demonstrated how governors adapted to an increasingly nationalized and programmatic party system.

The governors played important roles leading into and during the 1968 Republican Convention, not as presidential kingmakers but as candidates, shapers of the party platform, and featured members of the convention as spectacle. Despite not pushing one of their own to the top of the ticket, gubernatorial participation at the convention remained high by historical standards (see Figure 2). In 1968, twenty-one of the twenty-six sitting governors served as delegates.Footnote ¹⁴³

RGA meetings were often framed as venues for challengers to Nixon to capture national attention. The notion that governors could be kingmakers through influencing delegates on the floor had not died within the minds of journalists. The 1968 election was still within the era of a “mixed” system of presidential selection in which party elites retained a large degree of latitude in determining the presidential nominees.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ However, in 1968 the governors generally refrained from attempting to be presidential kingmakers. The RGA did not make an official endorsement of any candidate that year, setting a precedent for the organization not broken until the 2000 election. Without (near) unanimity by the governors and with three of the RGA's members running, a formal endorsement by the RGA risked exacerbating division. The schism between the conservative and liberal wings of the party was still fresh in their minds. Love noted at a December 1967 RGA meeting that “Nelson Rockefeller may be our strongest candidate, but I think we can win with Dick Nixon or George Romney too. I think any one of them could win it and be a good President. I just don't want to wind up with a candidate who will lose to the Democrat, whether it's Lyndon Johnson or Bobby Kennedy.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ A number of states sent uninstructed delegates to the convention.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

The governors used the RGA to ensure that they received prominent places in the convention as spectacle. Evans gave the keynote address, in which he called for robust Republican leadership and reflected the governors’ approach to racial justice and environmentalism. He said, “There is no place in that [the American] dream for a closed society, for a system which denies opportunity because of race, or the accident of birth, or geography or the misfortune of a family. Only when everyone has a stake in the future of this country; only when the doors of private enterprise are opened to all—only then will each person have something to preserve and something to build on for his children.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Governors could lead on these issues, given their importance in the construction of public policy at the state level.

Leading into and during the convention, the RGA's members focused their efforts on shaping the party platform rather than taking part in credentials disputes. Governors played a central role on the Platform Committee. Dirksen was, to the chagrin of Chafee, named chairman. Chafee had written to Bliss requesting Shafer be given the position of co-chair.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Ultimately, Chafee, not Shafer, was named deputy chairman and Governors Walter Hickel (AK) and Louie Nunn (KY) were named vice chairmen.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This marked something of a win for the RGA, given that the last sitting governor to serve on the Platform Committee was Tom Heany in 1948.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The RGA's policy committee compiled a 200-page document entitled the “Handbook of Suggested Solutions to Selected Domestic Issues.” Chafee, speaking before the Platform Committee, made a series of recommendations stemming from this document, including a proposal allowing welfare recipients to save a portion of the money they received from the federal government, a negative income tax and “racial balance” in schools.Footnote ¹⁵¹ He also pushed planks relating to federal-state relations, asking that the federal government “give the states greater latitude in the disbursement of federal funds that come to them.”Footnote ¹⁵² He argued that “an ever increasing percentage of the actions of the National Administration and Congress affect the states in every conceivable area; roads and welfare, education and health, Medicare and Medicaid, upgrading police and rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents, caring for the mentally retarded. The list runs nearly the entire gamut of state services.”Footnote ¹⁵³

The governors’ involvement through the RGA did have an impact on the party's platform, particularly concerning intergovernmental relations. In 1964, federalism was invoked as a means of preserving individual liberty: “And year after year freedom, diversity and individual, local and state responsibility have given way to regimentation, conformity and subservience to central power.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Moreover, “the Federal Government should act only in areas where it has Constitutional authority to act, and then only in respect to proven needs where individuals and local or state governments will not or cannot adequately perform.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The platform made vague allusions to intergovernmental cooperation. However, the emphasis was on the relationship between the size of the federal government and individual liberty.

Federal-state relations were a perennial theme of RGA meetings, and these planks were furthered by gubernatorial involvement at the convention. In 1965, for instance, the RGA and the Ripon Society issued a joint report endorsing bloc grants.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The Trumbull Society, in a paper presented to the RGA in 1964, noted that “a tradition of dual sovereignty can continue to survive in this nation only if national decision-makers understand that the existence of power need not dictate the exercise of power.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The form of federalism advocated for by the RGA was not a total devolution of power to the states. Rather, it embraced forms of federal action.

The 1968 platform called for “a new, vital partnership of government at all levels” that the party argued would “be a prime Republican objective.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The platform pledged “presidential leadership that “would “buttress state and local government” initiatives to deal with “the crisis of the cities,” including funding of state and local programs dealing with juvenile crime and greater cooperation with state and local law enforcement officials.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The platform stated that the party was “particularly determined to revise the grant-in-aid system and substitute bloc grants wherever possible. It is also important that state and local governments retain the historic right to raise funds by issuing tax-exempt securities.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

This form of federalism promoted partnership between party elites across levels of government. Nixon and the governors could agree on a form of “cooperative” federalism, but one that was distinct from that of LBJ. The states, rather than municipal governments such as in Johnson's Model Cities program, were to be given a more central place under Nixon. RGA activity in the platform hearings may not have caused Nixon to adopt a New Federalism, but foreshadowed Nixon's looking to the states, and governors, in pursuit of his domestic agenda. Ultimately, while the governors’ attitudes toward federalism were distinct from those of Goldwater's supporters, the platform was still crafted in a way that drew distinctions between the GOP governors and the Democratic party.

5.1. 1968 and the Politics of the DGC: Governors as Brokers

DGC activities in 1968 continued to reflect the governors’ reliance on traditional means of influencing national party politics. Indeed, DGC activities in 1968 reflected the affairs of the DGC and RGA in 1964 to a much greater extent than RGA activities in 1968.

Like RGA meetings, DGC conferences included much discussion about presidential politics but did not result in the promotion of a governor for the nomination. This was true in 1968, a contest in which divisions within the party manifested both inside and outside the convention hall in Chicago where mass demonstrations often overshadowed press coverage of the affairs of the convention itself. Significantly, the governors continued to act mainly as brokers of state delegates rather than engage the convention as spectacle.

LBJ announced he would not seek the nomination in late March. Despite overseeing one of the most significant periods of legislative achievement in American history, LBJ's popularity had plummeted due to mounting casualties in Vietnam and the race riots plaguing the nation's cities. Johnson's reputation as a political powerbroker also did not help his standing. Joseph Califano once noted that the president “learned too late that the manipulative and devious behavior commonplace in the back alleys of legislative politics appalled the American people when exposed in their president.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Wallace, and Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy became the eventual contenders for the nomination.

Some governors emphasized party unity leading into the campaign season. At a meeting in New York, Governor Docking (KS) said, “It is necessary to our basic freedoms that each of us develop intelligent opinions on a matter of great national concern, but it is most strategic not to publicly take our President to task in the mass media.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Doing so risked exposing the divide within the party thereby sending mixed signals to voters.

A meeting was held in mid-April in St. Louis at Connally's suggestion. Expectations were that the conference would end in a repudiation of Kennedy's candidacy, perhaps in the form of a de facto embrace of Humphrey. Only two sitting Democratic governors from the Northeast, Hoff and Kenneth M. Curtis (ME) had, at that point, publicly endorsed Kennedy.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Sensing animosity among a contingent of governors, the Kennedy campaign chartered a plane for Curtis to attend the event, for which he interrupted a Florida vacation.Footnote ¹⁸² Seventeen governors attended the four-hour event, but little progress was made. Sixteen of them signed a vague statement that “every effort will be made for a decision at the proper time” regarding the party's nominee and the platform.Footnote ¹⁸³ Governor Williams, remaining committed to Wallace, refused to back even that pledge. Maddox announced that he was not willing to back either Kennedy or McCarthy. Hughes, as chairman, remained neutral and denied that the meeting was meant to block Kennedy.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Ultimately, Hughes lamented that “there's not enough unity among the Governors for there to be anything but divisiveness.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵

A lack of unity among the governors continued through the convention in Chicago. Overall participation by the Democratic governors did not rise during the 1960s (see Figure 2), and individual governors continued to play the traditional role of broker. While most Southern governors endorsed Humphrey, disagreements became quite visible. Maddox, for instance, continued to endorse Wallace until the very end.

Debates over convention rules also demonstrated the split among the governors. Of importance was the so-called unit rule, which allowed Southern states to control delegations as a block. Humphrey's allies indicated that they would not seek to change the provision but later pushed through a “freedom of conscience” rule that effectively eliminated the binding of delegates to state party leaders, mirroring efforts by Republican governors in 1952 to weaken Southern state party control over their delegations.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Connally used his favorite-son candidacy to rally Texas delegates to Humphrey after toying with the idea of drafting LBJ back into the race. Humphrey, who did not enter primaries, relying on an insider strategy, calculated that he would not jeopardize his nomination by agreeing to the rule change.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The change threatened to undermine the governors’ ability to influence the nomination through their sway over delegates.

Southern delegations also faced several challenges at the convention. Indeed, the 1968 DNC “produced the greatest number of credentials disputes in the Convention's history” and often had to do with race.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Alabama, for instance, put forward a slate of electors that included known Wallace loyalists.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ After the 1964 convention, a Special Equal Rights Committee was established with the purpose of working with state parties in studying and remedying racial discrimination. The committee was chaired by Governor David Lawrence (PA) and later Hughes. A report by the committee led to credential challenges for the delegations of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Maddox had handpicked the original delegation from Georgia.

The governors engaged in limited discussions over the development of the party's platform. However, their participation was atomized rather than coordinated. They did not obtain leadership roles on the committee. The closest they came to using the DGC to influence the platform came in the backing of three resolutions that the NGC had agreed upon at that year's meeting in Cincinnati regarding grants-in-aid, education, and highway funding.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Connally also addressed the Resolutions Committee, focusing his remarks on the Vietnam War. Connally asked that the committee “write a plank denouncing not our actions but denouncing Communist aggression in South Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and anywhere else in the world.”Footnote ¹⁹²

The party's platform that year boasted of the numerous legislative achievements that took place under the leadership of President Johnson and unified Democratic control of Congress. However, the platform did not highlight the role of state governments in achieving those ends. Rather, a great deal of the discussion of intergovernmental relations in the document emphasized federal-municipal relations, including Model Cities. The creation of HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) in 1965 was noted as a means of giving “our cities a spokesman of Cabinet rank.”Footnote ¹⁹³

Thus, while governors, individually, played important roles within the presidential nomination contest, their involvement remained far more traditional and unorganized in comparison to their Republican counterparts. While Republicans used the RGA as a means of gaining access to important posts within the convention, Democrats remained divided on candidate selection and did not organize vigorously as a united force within the party. Additionally, emphasizing dual federalism demonstrated the governors’ divisions and a reliance on more traditional roles within party politics, including brokerage roles and favorite-son candidacies at the convention.