Why was Lyndon Johnson referred to as Landslide Lyndon?

Answer 1

At that time , the 1964 Presidential election , winning 61 % of the vote was unprecedented ; a landslide .

Nope.

Johnson was hung with that name in 1948, after being elected as the Democratic candidate for the senate by the narrowest margin in the history of Texas... as far away from a Landslide as anyone had ever come and still been elected.

He won the primary by 87 votes, in an election where over a million votes were cast statewide.

That is why he came to be called Landslide Lyndon, the same way really huge men are sometimes nicknamed "Tiny".

This was a tongue-in-cheek nickname given to him after he was voted in as the Democratic candidate for Senate in 1948, running against Coke Stevenson, the former Governor Of Texas.

One ballot box, in Precinct 13 of Alice, Texas, decided the primary race.

An election clerk later said that the voting roll for that precinct contained a lot of names in alphabetic sequence, many apparently in the same ink & handwriting, and a couple of which he knew personally to be dead.

Coke Stevenson took it to the election committee and federal court to have them decide the validity of the election but when a subpoena was issued for ballot box 13, it couldn't be found, and has never been found since.

It contained the voting roll in question, where the voters signed in before casting their ballots, along with the actual ballots.

It's believed that the margin of victory was provided by George Parr, popularly known as "The Duke Of Duval County", who had his enforcer, Luis Salas (also an election judge), cast over 200 ballots for Johnson on behalf of "nonvoters" in the 13th precinct, several days after the polls had closed.

Being the Election Judge for that precinct, he also certified the votes.

Salas admitted to this in to The Associated Press in a 1977 interview with Jim Mangan, the AP's Texas bureau chief at the time. Parr was dead and the statute of limitations had kicked in by then.

In 1948, the votes were counted by people looking at physical pieces of paper and tallying them by hand, so it took a while to determine who had actually won an election.

Johnson had that nickname as a senator,

There is a photo around that shows Parr and Salas with feet up on the bumper of a 1940's Olds, or Chevy out in an open field somewhere, with a wooden box on it's hood, between them.

Supposedly that WAS Ballot Box 13, and speculation is that it was put into a small hole dug in the ground, burned completely, then the ashes buried.

This photo was shown on TV to an interviewer by John Connally, shortly before his death.