2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: In 1980, did Ted Kennedy endorse Jimmy Carter? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)At the time Bobby was assassinated, he was still strongly in contention for the nomination and few Democrats(other than bitter-end LBJ loyalists)resented him for running.
And there was no possible way Bobby's candidacy could be blamed for the Democratic loss in the fall of '68. The party was always doomed to lose if the party leaders were going to insist on nominating someone virtually no one voted for(Hubert Humphrey)as a defiant supporter of a war the nation(especially the Democratic half of the nation) had turned against. The only reason Humphrey was even able to make it a close race(he was thirteen points behind at the end of September)was that he finally edged away from Johnson's position on Vietnam. It was hardly Bobby's fault that Lyndon Johnson cared more about keeping the party in support of his war than about saving the country from Nixon.