The assassination attempt of a divisive figure, a foreign war threatening to take centre stage, the incumbent president withdrawing his candidacy and endorsing the vice-president: the 2024 US presidential race is starting to take on an eerie resemblance to that of 1968.
In that year, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson shocked Americans when he announced he would not be seeking another term. His exit threw the Democratic campaign into chaos, which only deepened after the party’s leading candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed in June. (In this respect, Donald Trump literally dodged a bullet.)
Faced with little time to nominate a successor, the Democrats ultimately turned to Johnson’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, who was unable to defeat the Republican nominee Richard Nixon in November.
