From the beginning of the chapter:
By 1960, most conservatives probably agreed with Goldwater's words at the Republican National Convention that the time had come for direct political action, but they did not necessarily agree on the road to dominion. Even if they felt like Goldwater that the GOP was their historic home, not everyone believed that "taking back" the GOP was possible, or even desirable in the foreseeable future. Some believed that conservatives would be in a better position by either attempting to create a bipartisan conservative coalition, or by creating an independent party. They also believed that either a bipartisan coalition or an independent party would be able to win support from a large group of voters who at the moment were beyond the reach of the Republican Party.
A bipartisan coalition would be fragile in the long run, and it would also be very difficult to get any high-ranking members of either party to risk their political life on such a venture. Regarding the third-party strategy, the American electoral system left it with very poor odds. Although third parties had been influential in several elections throughout American history, only one third party had ever won a presidential election: the Republican Party in 1860. History also suggested that it required a major crisis or an important issue, which the established parties had failed to address before any significant part of the electorate would support a third-party candidate. Conservatives hardly had such an issue in the early 1960s.
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