Kheel Center/Flickr In one of California's most famous
presidential primaries, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy (left) was
assassinated after his victory speech in 1968. When Rick
Santorum folded his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination earlier this month, he also doomed the California
presidential primary to irrelevance – for the ninth election and
36th year in a row. California’s Republican primary hasn’t made
a difference in presidential politics since June 1976, when
favorite son and future President Ronald Reagan beat then-
President Gerald Ford. Reagan rode the momentum of his primary
victory into the GOP convention in Kansas City, Mo., but he
failed to win the nomination; Ford, roughed up by the bruising
campaign, went on to lose the election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.
On the Democratic side, the last California primary that really
mattered was in 1972, when the peace candidate, George McGovern,
beat former Vice President Hubert Humphrey in a contest
dominated by debate over the Vietnam War. Wit