of the vote. After that, Texas law was changed to require a runoff between the two leading candidates in a special election if no one had a majority in the first round). Blakley left the Senate saying, "I shall go back to my boots and saddle and ride toward the Western sunset." When the seat came up again the following year in the ordinary election cycle, Blakley ran in the primary against Yarborough as the conservative "Shivercrat" candidate. Blakley ran with the backing of Price Daniel, Yarborough's colleague in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, and the southern bloc of senators who disagreed with Yarborough's progressive platform against segregation. The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan, backed Yarborough in the election though he had supported naming Blakley to the temporary Senate seat in 1957. Rayburn's support proved critical. Blakley was defeated in the primary, and Yarborough kept his Senate seat by a margin of 680,000 to Blakley's 486,000. Senate appointment and subsequent loss In 1961, upon Lyndon Johnson becoming Vice President of the United States, Blakley was appointed to fill Johnson's vacated Senate seat. Contention again appeared between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party for the nomination in the special election that would follow; Blakley maintained that he had vigorously resisted John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" legislation, which was unpopular with Texas conservatives. Consequently, Ralph Yarborough did not endorse Blakley among the 71 candidates who ran without party designation. Blakley ran a weak second with 191,818 (18.1 percent) votes to Republican John Tower's 327,308 (30.9 percent), with the remaining ballots divided among five other major Democratic candidates, including future U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright of Fort Worth, with 171,328 (16.2 percent). In the special election runoff, some Texas liberals refused to vote for a Democratic candidate who seemed as conservative as the Republican nominee, and some Texas conservatives viewed Blakley's conservatism as lukewarm. Blakley, at 62, was older than his Republican opponent, John Tower, 35. Tower won the seat in the special election runoff with 448,217 votes (50.6 percent) to Blakley's 437,872 (49.4 percent), a margin of 10,343. Blakley was the first Democratic senator to lose to a Republican in Texas in over eighty years. Final years and death After losing the Senate election, Blakley left politics and returned to his business interests. He died in Dallas and is buried there in