That's a myth with little grounding in reality. He knew he'd lost a lot of voters in the South over the Bill but he didn't lose all of them and he could have carried an election had it not been for the fact that he lost Cronkite.
Had Johnson run, he would have beaten Nixon were it not for Viet Nam. His loss of 'democrats' in the south didn't hurt nearly as much as his loss of Democrats in the rest of the nation who supported him on the Bill but not on Viet Nam...
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