In the years after his defeat, Nixon established himself as an important party leader who appealed to both moderates and conservatives. Nixon entered the race for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination confident that, with the Democrats torn apart over the war in Vietnam, a Republican had a good chance of winning the presidency in November, although he expected the election to be as close as in 1960. One year prior to the 1968 Republican National Convention the early favorite for the party's presidential nomination was Michigan governor George Romney, but Romney's campaign foundered on the issue of the Vietnam War. At the start of 1968, most Democrats expected that President Lyndon B. Johnson would be re-nominated. Those expectations were shattered by Senator Eugene McCarthy, who centered his campaign on opposition to Johnson's Vietnam policies. Post-convention Labor Day surveys had Humphrey trailing Nixon by more than 20 percentage points. Main article: Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War.