The Lyndon Johnson Precedent: What Makes the President Drop Out?
Or, How to Induce a Presidential Transition
I will start this with a disclaimer: The only person who knows what Lyndon Johnson drop out was Lyndon Johnson. He never told anyone, never wrote it down, never said a word. And he’s been dead for quite a few decades now, so we can’t ask him anyway. But we can learn from the environment he operated in and eventually walked away from to understand at least some of what Biden is working with.
There were, of course, several major problems that Lyndon Johnson had that Biden did not. While both were evil, the Vietnam War, unlike Gaza, involved millions of American soldiers. Joe Biden is not fighting to eradicate Jim Crow with half his party trying to preserve it. His coalition is not trying to tear itself apart over existential issues. So he is in a better position, at least in that sense.
The largest problem for Lyndon Johnson (at least, as I understand it), is that his Party’s voters had come to view success of other parts of the coalition as detrimental to their own. This is often viewed of the death of the New Deal Coalition but this is not quite the case. Lyndon Johnson’s coalition was substantively different from the one that had elected FDR. (In fact, the coalition had been shifting in important ways since the 1940’s, but that is outside the scope of this essay.) That (white) Southerners had quit the Party over Civil Rights is not exactly a secret. The problem leading up to 1968 was that white Northerners and Westerners were getting ready to bolt for similar racist reasons. This was exacerbated by riots over the intolerable conditions in Americas ghettoes. The “Long, Hot Summer” provided a convenient justification for whites outside the south to turn their back on desegregation. As Hubert Humphrey would put it, “Segregationists and some white conservatives use the riots as an excuse not to take the action for racial justice that they do not support anyway. They are very much afraid we will “reward the rioters,” as they say…Ever since Watts, and particularly since Detroit and Newark, the discussion of equal rights has been distorted and sometimes even sidetracked by the very different issues of riots and civil disorders, of “crime in the streets’ and ‘law and order.”1 The electoral climate was no better. Conservative and moderate whites alike turned fearmongering against “black radicals” into electoral superjuice.2 The mood of the country was turning against Black progress.
For ethnic whites (Polish, Italians, Irish, Germans, etc.), the defeat of Jim Crow in the South was sort-of popular, but actually enforcing it in the North would be not be. When polled, although a majority of Americans supported the Civil Rights Act, just less than 1/5 wanted “vigorous enforcement.”3 Housing discrimination was twice as popular as anti-discrimination law.4 Overturning a law banning housing discrimination was the central issue of Ronald Reagan’s successful run for governor.5
This is a brief overview, but if you were Lyndon Johnson, who had staked enormous amounts of political capital, time, and emotional investment in the passage of civil rights, it was almost certainly beyond disheartening. More than that, his relationship with Martin Luther King (the foremost leader of non-violent civil rights activism) was deteriorating fast over Vietnam.6
Vietnam is not Gaza. There are no American troops in Rafah, no American jets doing bombing runs over the Eastern Mediterranean, no American soldiers running from village to village, raping and murdering. No clouds of Agent Orange, no napalm flares. The United States is, of course, implicated by funding the Israeli war machine, but that is politically different. And perhaps just as importantly, it is emotionally different. From the very beginning of his Administration, Johnson had said he did not want to be a war president. War would get in the way of his plans for domestic reform.7 This unfortunately did not happen. By contrast, when Biden was interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and was asked why he wanted a second term, the overwhelming majority of it was foreign policy.8 Biden has an emotional investment in foreign policy that Johnson never did.
The last, and perhaps most important part of the Lyndon Johnson Precedent is the mechanism for adjudicating who was going to replace him. The first reality is simply that the Democratic National Convention (or Committee, for that matter) does not have the power it once did.9 The rules have changed. This change began with the 1952 presidential campaign of Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Kefauver ran a primary-focused campaign and won the vast majority of them. Unfortunately for him, the primaries simply did not matter. Truman maneuvered to have his delegates vote for Adlai Stevenson anyway. But in 1956, to placate Kefauver and smooth out the tarnishing of the party’s image, a new rule appeared: delegates had to actually vote for who their state selected them to. This process was accelerated by Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy’s doomed runs, where their primary heavy campaigns were completely demolished at the actual convention by Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in any of them. More and more states held primaries and caucus, and more and more states required those delegates to actually vote for the people their state did. The last vestiges of the old system, the “super-delegates” went extinct after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign died.
There is, however, more to it than this. The world that the old model was set to work with—delegates whose votes bosses could reliably control and trade for votes doesn’t exist anymore. It does not exist at the national level, it barely exists in any state outside of New Jersey. Voters got rid of the smoke-filled rooms at the convention, but the social world that it existed to serve does not exist anymore either. We no longer have tradeable, controllable voting blocs that follow leaders. Ethnic and religious identifications barely exist outside of vague racial blocs and a few WASP skeletons in Massachusetts. That world fell apart politically in the 1970s and 1980s.10 Voters belong to interest groups, but the interest group is not all-consuming in the way it used to be. A good example of this is unions. The majority (the vast majority) of unions endorsed Biden, but he got barely more than half of union votes. This is not because Trump won a lot of endorsements but because Union workers split from the endorsement to vote Trump. Not only have interest groups ceased to be an all-consuming identity, they have also lost the ability to impose discipline on errant members.
So, how to force out a president? Biden’s coalition is different than Johnson’s, and the party voters are not (currently) at war with one another. So that’s out. Emotionally, a second term for either Johnson and Biden both would almost certainly be focused entirely on foreign policy, but while Johnson would have hated that, Biden lives and breathes for it. And the instrument that let Johnson be secure over the succession doesn’t exist anymore. The Convention as it stands is a carefully choreographed show. The delegates pledged are not part of some larger local machine but instead ordinary Democratic voters who care deeply about politics. Party elites could try to steer, but they have no actual control. And Biden seems impervious to the idea that he is behind. To get him out of the race, he needs to make the same calculation that got Johnson out: it just isn’t worth it. Absent party leadership telling him to his face he needs to go, like Johnson had,11 we’ll be Ridin’ With Biden into November.
Vesla M. Weaver “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy.” Studies in American Political Development 21, no. 2 (2007): 250 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X07000211.
Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield : The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2020), 265
Andrew Kohut, “From the archives: 50 years ago: Mixed views about civil rights but support for Selma demonstrators”, Pew Research Center, January 16, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/01/16/50-years-ago-mixed-views-about-civil-rights-but-support-for-selma-demonstrators/
Emily Badger, “28 Percent of Whites say they favour a law allowing homeowners to discriminate”, Washington Post, July 09, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/09/white-views-on-desegregation-have-long-lagged-behind-the-law/
Daniel Martinez HoSang, "Racial Liberalism and the Rise of the Sunbelt West: The Defeat of Fair Housing on the 1964 California Ballot" In Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region edited by Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 188-214.
Joseph, The Sword and the Shield, 267-300.
Joshua Zeitz. Building the Great Society : Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House. (New York, New York: Viking, 2018), 241.
George Stephanopoulos, “Full interview: One-on-one with President Biden l ABC News Exclusive”, ABC, July 05, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/live/0kpibhlagG0
The Texas Regular, “A Brief History of the Democratic Party's Nomination System”, The Vantage Point, Continued, July 01, 2024. https://lbjvantagepoint.com/%22the-texas-regular%22/f/a-brief-history-of-the-democratic-partys-nomination-system
Steven Gillon, The Democrats' Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (New York, Columbia University Press, 1992), 372-381, 386-392.
Randall Bennett Woods. LBJ : Architect of American Ambition. (New York: Free Press, 2006), 1118