Post by mcnutt on Sept 19, 2018 17:12:25 GMT
There was an idea floated in the beginning of the Kennedy Administration that Johnson would be defacto Majority Leader. Some Democratic Senators objected to the interference of the Executive Branch. What if those Senators showed more loyalty to the Democratic Party. So ITTL Johnson was the real leader of the Democratic majority in Congress. Could we gotten an earlier Medicare and a tax cut? LBJ has power because Kennedy listens to him. One piece of advice from Johnson that Kennedy ignored was to delay the introduction of the civil rights bill because Southerners would block the other legislation that Kennedy wanted. ITTL Kennedy follows the advice. What became the 1964 Civil Rights Act is introduced on November 1, 1963. Kennedy has been working on it for six months. So all the compromises that need to be made have been made. It passes quickly. LBJ make a big push for it after the assasination. Johnson signs it into law in late January 1964, rather then the OTL July 2, 1964. With the battle against segregation won, Martin Luther King focuses on voting rights. In February 1964, the Alabama State Troopers attack the peaceful marchers in Selma. That leads to the Voting Rights Act of 1964. With the dramatic increase in Black voters, Johnson wins a bigger landslide. He carries Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. Leaving Goldwater with only Arizona, Mississippi and Alabama, So the Electoral College would have been Johnson 522 and Goldwater 22.