I enjoyed your comments...I'd surmise I'm slightly older than you..I'm 56..if we had FOX news, talk radio, and the internet in 1964..Goldwater would have beaten LBJ..
Not a chance. See my posts about self-hypnosis and Kerry. In Kerry's case he has hypnotized himself into losing this election because of extreme self-loathing. In Goldwater's case he knew he couldn't win the election (in large part due to the fact that the public didn't want another changeover so soon after the JFK assasination) so he programmed himself to lose. As proof is Goldwater's convention speech about "extremism." Dumb choice of words since he was being called an extremist. Therefore he did everything he could do to lose by a landslide. Read accounts of the Goldwater campaign. He basically just relaxed and had a good time since he knew he would lose and programmed himself to lose.
I'm a couple of years younger. But wouldn't the world be a vastly different place if he had. The Vietnam war would have had totally different ending, Tricky Dick would never have become President, so no Watergate for the left wing reporters to make their bones on. Heck he might have been succeed in '72 by Ronald Reagan, who ran a good primary campaign against Ford in the real world in '76. The Soviet Union would have fallen apart in about 1980, maybe sooner since AuH20 would have many Reagan like foreign and military policies.
Paging Harry Turtledove, your story line phone is ringing.