In 1964, California Republicans and the Hollywood Right found themselves once again in a familiar pattern: disarray. Democrats held the governor’s mansion, with Pat Brown’s victory in 1962 over Nixon, and Democrats controlled both houses in the state legislature. As a result, the Democrats were able to push through a progressive social agenda. Nixon’s loss left Republicans split into factions, divisions that were deepened in the following two years by the rapid rise of the hard line right led by the John Birch Society. Formed in 1958 by New England candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the Society attracted considerable support in Southern California. Birchers, as members of the Society were called, continued to believe that domestic communism was a real threat in the United States, going so far as to proclaim that communists controlled 80 to 90 percent of the federal government. This kept the communist issue alive in California politics at a time when most Americans, including most conservatives, wanted to move on to other issues. For mainstream conservative Republicans, the Soviet threat remained real, but looking for domestic communism was unnecessary and dead-end politics that only played into the caricature of the paranoid right portrayed in hundreds of newspaper articles, editorials, and even pop songs like the Beach Boys “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”

The aggressive strategy of the hard right to purge the Republican Party of moderates following the 1962 election irritated Nixon supporters in California. When Nixon’s nemesis Joe Shell, who had challenged him in the governor’s primary, was appointed to an important position in the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign in California, key Republicans such as Justin Dart and Leonard Firestone threw their support to Nelson Rockefeller in the California presidential primary.