“Lyndon Johnson Elected Senator!” (Dallas Morning News, June 28, 1941)

But he was not.

LBJ lost the hard-fought race to conservative W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel by just 1,311 votes. There is evidence that state leaders working on behalf of liquor, gambling, and horse-racing interests had swung the election to O’Daniel in order to get him out of Texas. (Woods, 154; Caro, 735; Dallek, 221.)

After LBJ had declared victory, there were remarkable number of late-reported votes in South Texas that came in for O’Daniel. Despite calls for an investigation from members of the Texas legislature, John Connally, and even the Southwest Texas State Teachers College professor H. M. Greene, the results became official.

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