1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries
From March to July 1968, Democratic Party voters elected delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention for the purpose of selecting the party's nominee for President in the upcoming election. After an inconclusive and tumultuous campaign marred by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated at the 1968 Democratic National Convention held from August 26 to August 29, 1968, in Chicago, Illinois. The primary season began with incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson expected to win re-nomination for a second consecutive election, despite low approval ratings following the Tet Offensive in January 1968. His only significant challenger was Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war Senator from Minnesota. After McCarthy nearly won the New Hampshire primary, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, another critic of the war and the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, entered the race. Johnson soon announced that he would not campaign for re-election. In April, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey joined the race as the establishment candidate; he did not criticize the administration's conduct of the war and avoided the popular contests for delegates. McCarthy and Kennedy traded primary victories while Humphrey collected delegates through the closed caucus and convention systems in place in most states. The race was upended on June 5, the night of the California and South Dakota primaries. Both races went for Kennedy, but he was assassinated after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. At the moment of his assassination, Kennedy trailed Humphrey in the delegate count with McCarthy third. Without any obligation to vote for Kennedy, most delegates backed Humphrey over McCarthy or fell behind Kennedy supporter George McGovern. At the convention, Humphrey secured the nomination easily despite anti-war protests outside the convention center; he went on to lose the presidential election narrowly to Richard Nixon. Partly in reaction to Humphrey's victory without entering most state primaries, George McGovern led the McGovern–Fraser Commission, dramatically reforming the nomination process to expand the use of primaries. Background 1960 and 1964 presidential elections In 1960, John F. Kennedy won the Democratic nomination over Lyndon B. Johnson. After he secured the nomination at the party convention, Kennedy offered Johnson the vice presidential nomination; the offer was a surprise, and some Kennedy supporters claimed that the nominee expected Johnson to decline. Robert F. Kennedy, the nominee's brother and campaign manager, reportedly went to Johnson's hotel suite to dissuade Johnson from accepting. Johnson accepted, and the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was narrowly elected, but the 1960 campaign intensified the personal enmity between Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, which dated to as early as 1953. President Kennedy named his brother to his cabinet as United States Attorney General. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963; Johnson succeeded him with tremendous national popularity amid a wave of mourning and sympathy. Robert Kennedy remained in the cabinet for several months amid what Johnson staffers began to refer to as "the Bobby problem": despite the personal hatred between the two, Democratic voters overwhelmingly favored Kennedy as