Miller may have been conservative but he seems to have been a rather uninspired choice.
Goldwater is said to have said of Miller “He drives Johnson nuts”. I read someone that Johnson or a staffer claimed that in fact Johnson didn’t or barely knew who Miller was, I find that believable as I don’t know of any great heroics by Miller that would have drawn ire. I also read that his attitude on the campaign trail was one of joking around with reporter scum whilst being resigned to inglorious defeat.
Wiki references some book that listed other potential candidates, like Claire Booth Luce and Former CT Governor and movie actor John Davis Lodge (brother of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr).
George Wallace was also said to be interested but was politely told to f off.
Bill Miller, in addition to being a Congressman, also served simultaneously as RNC Chairman from 1961 until he stepped down to run as VP in the Summer of 1964. That was his claim to a prominent position within the party.
Virtually everyone knew it was going to be a kamikaze run and unwinnable, so I can see why many others chose not to run with Goldwater. From what I was able to glean from correspondence with Gov. Bill Scranton (who, of course, wanted to stop Goldwater and be the nominee himself - and he wouldn’t have had to give up the Governorship), seemed to be about not having an epic blowout in Congressional races. That, of course, happened.
All those gargantuan majorities won by the Senate Dems in 1958 mostly got a pass and they didn’t start to get taken down until 1970 or later. The similar massive Dem House wins enabled them to go nuts on their radical leftist social programs without opposition. In this instance, Scranton and their side DID have a point. But endorsing LBJ, as many RINOs did, made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had they stuck with Goldwater, the losses in Congress might’ve been fewer and enough to have perhaps curtailed the madness of the 1965-66 Congress.
I can’t imagine how George Wallace would’ve ever been able to get on the ticket as VP even if he wanted to. He would’ve had to have switched parties first, and given that he was in control of the AL Democrat machine, that would’ve proven nearly impossible. Goldwater didn’t need him, anyway, as he carried AL and the GOP won a majority of the House delegation there, the first time the GOP had won a House seat in the state since the 1890s (they went from 0-8 to 5R-3D in one shot, offsetting what would’ve been even greater House losses. They also won a seat in Mississippi for the first time since Reconstruction and Georgia, too, with Bo Callaway).
The GOP, of course, didn’t want to embrace Wallace’s brand of segregationist politics. That would’ve killed the party outside the South. Dems could get away with that crap, but not the GOP. The overwhelming majority of the party was supportive of Civil Rights. Sadly, the long-term damage with Goldwater is that because he opposed the 1964 CRA as an overreach of federal power (and not due to racism, as many Blacks were told to believe, as he had previously supported Civil Rights laws), that it drove down national Black support from 25-30% to less than 10% (and in some areas where the GOP could get even higher % than 30, such as the South).
But you pretty much know all that.