Poll shows Trump leads Biden slightly, but many voters remain undecided
An exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll shows Trump leading Biden slightly, but a large percentage of voters remain undecided.
WASHINGTON — Some voters probably still hope Joe Biden and/or Donald Trump will do what Lyndon Baines Johnson did nearly 56 years ago: Pull out of the presidential race under public pressure.
After all, Biden has heard widespread concerns about his age, and Trump faces four separate criminal trials. The dynamics have led political observers on both sides of the aisle to ask: Should Trump and Biden step aside, or be pushed away?
It almost surely won’t happen, barring death or a medical emergency. And it was never going to happen, thanks in large part to political changes that followed Johnson’s surprise decision to retire.
In the decades to come, LBJ’s stunning announcement on March 31, 1968 led to full-time reliance on primaries and caucuses to pick presidential nominees, a system that tends to benefit incumbent presidents and well-heeled candidates. That includes Biden and Trump this time around.
The political parties “established new rules that basically created the primary-and-caucus system,” said presidential historian Joshua Zeitz.
Thanks to the ghost of LBJ, it’s essentially too late for Biden or Trump to pull out of the race for the White House, after the current and former presidents locked down the Democratic and Republican nominations Tuesday. And it was never really in the cards because of the ways in which political parties responded to the tumultuous 1968 election.
‘Accordingly, I shall not seek …’
Johnson became president upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and won a landslide election of his own in 1964. But he fell into political peril in early 1968.
Rising opposition to the Vietnam War undercut Johnson, who faced two-prominent anti-war challengers for the Democratic nomination, Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of the slain president. Both won the support of cadres of young people opposed to the war.
On the Sunday night of March 31, 1968, Johnson delivered a prime-time address to announce a bombing pause and urge the North Vietnamese to negotiate.
He tacked on a surprise ending.
After saying “I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” Johnson added that “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.”
“Accordingly,” he said, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Short-term: A nominee who entered no primaries
In the months after Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election, Kennedy was killed, McCarthy’s popularity faded, and the Democrats wound up nominating Vice President Hubert Humphrey – a late entrant who did not compete in a single primary.
Back then, Zeitz explained, only 15 states used primaries to choose convention delegates. This was back in the day when party power brokers, including Johnson, still a had significant say in picking presidential nominees.
“Humphrey did not run in a single primary,” said Zeitz, author of “Building The Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House.” “And there he was, anointed at the convention.”
It all changed after Humphrey lost the 1968 general election to Republican Richard Nixon, a complicated three-candidate race that included states-rights segregationist George Wallace.
All primaries (and caucuses), all the time
Democrats, and eventually Republicans, responded to the chaos of 1968 by changing the nomination process, building it on meaningful primaries and caucuses and, in theory, giving voters the power to pick nominees.
Longshot candidates like George McGovern (in 1972), Jimmy Carter (in 1976), and Barack Obama (in 2008) used primaries to overtake favored opponents. They built momentum on the state level instead of among…
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