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I was asked to post this as an OP. It originally came up in another thread.
The question is, was the democratic party wrong to have abandoned LBJ in '68?
Basically what happened was that he lost the confidence of the democratic party (which admittedly was just coming out of a very long period of reformation). He had lied his way through the '64 election and then ran up the war in Vietnam despite running against such concepts. There was some concern that the whole "Gulf of Tonkin" affair was a sham. And going into the '68 elections, he was basically committing to a continuation of the war well into his second term.
Along came Robert Kennedy and prepared to challenge LBJ in the primaries. LBJ quickly saw that he might very well lose the primary, and so he bowed out of the race altogether.
So, were the democrats wrong to abandon a sitting president? Should party support and renominate an incumbent president pretty much regardless of what he actually does?
Prior to making assertions about the rise of Nixon, do realize that Kennedy was assasinated in June of the election year and really threw the party into chaos. The sitting VP, who could only distance himself so far from LBJ, became the nominee. We don't know if Kennedy could have won the general election.
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