Lyndon Johnson's Victory in the 1948 Texas Senate Race: A Reappraisal

Abstract

Six days after the 1948 Texas senatorial runoff election, enigmatically amended returns produced what the winning candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, humorously referred to as his 87-vote landslide. Without his allegedly fraudulent victory over former Governor Coke Stevenson, LBJ probably would not have continued his political career; and his later influence over national politics as majority leader in the Senate, as vice-president, and finally as president, would have been lost. Accounts by historians of LBJ's razor-thin victory have invariably converged on the Thirteenth Precinct in the South Texas town of Alice in Jim Wells County, where 202 Mexican-American voters, some of whom were deceased or had been absent from the county on election day, reportedly lined up in alphabetical order at the very last minute to cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Johnson.1