A question about RFK

[Capt. Obvious]

53. This thread is all about hypotheticals - I gave mine

But,

Lyndon Johnson was concerned that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South.[27] In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters who had long been beyond the reach of the Republican Party.

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With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched parties in 1964, Richard Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order." Many liberals accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" stands.[30]

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated the Southern strategy.[31] With a much more explicit attack on integration and black civil rights, Wallace won all of Goldwater's states (except South Carolina), as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina's electoral votes. Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, while Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey's only southern state was Texas. Writer Jeffrey Hart who worked on the Nixon campaign as a speechwriter says that Nixon did not have a "Southern Strategy" but "Border State Strategy" as the campaign ceded the Deep South to George Wallace and that the press merely call it a "Southern Strategy" as they are "very lazy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Roots_of_the_Southern_strategy

And,

Wallace's "outsider" status was once again popular with voters, particularly in the rural South. He won almost 10 million popular votes, carried five Southern states, came fairly close to receiving enough votes to throw the election to the House of Representatives, and became the last person (as of 2011) who was not the nominee of one of the two major parties to win electoral votes. He was the first such person since Harry F. Byrd, an independent segregationist candidate in the 1960 presidential election. (John Hospers in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1976, Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 and John Edwards in 2004 all received one electoral vote from dissenters, but none "won" these votes.) Wallace also received the vote of one North Carolina elector who was pledged to Nixon.

Wallace was the most popular 1968 presidential candidate among young men.[10] Wallace also proved to be popular among blue-collar workers in the North and Midwest, and he took many votes which might have gone to Humphrey.[citation needed]

Wallace lost North Carolina and Tennessee to Nixon by narrow, "statistically insignificant margins". Carter suggests that better organization would have allowed Wallace to achieve his goal of forcing the election into the House of Representatives: With either North Carolina or Tennessee in the Wallace column, a change less than 1% in New Jersey or Ohio would have thrown the election.[11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace_presidential_campaign,_1968#General_election_results