Who would take the place of John Kerry if he became incapacitated?

Factual Questions
1

I have often wonderered this… who would be second in line to run against bush if something happened to Kerry and he was not able to campaign, run for president, etc?.. has this ever happened before?

2

It would be whoever the convention nominates.

3

Possibly the closest thing that has happened would be Horace Greeley - in the 1872 election, Greeley died between the end of the election and the meeting of the electoral college. He didn’t have the required electoral votes to beat Grant, so it’s mostly of academic interest. The electors pledged to Greeley scattered their votes among the remaining candidates, and Grant is credited with a landslide - 3 Georgia electors voted for Greeley anyway, and their votes weren’t counted.

Kerry hasn’t been nominated yet - if he dropped dead today, the Democratic convention would just nominate somebody else.

If Kerry died with a lot of lead time, but after the convention, I would imagine that the Democratic party would convene some sort of emergency convention to figure out who was their official candidate. I don’t believe there is any formal procedure to be followed in this case, but I could easily be wrong.

4

Actually, isn’t the closest thing to this what happened in 1968? When Robert Kennedy was killed on June 6, 1968, he was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party. Eugene McCarthy was running second overall in the primaries, and a new candidate, George McGovern, entered the race on August 10th, twelve days before the Democratic Convention.

The nomination, however, went to Vice President Hubert Humphery, who for the most part, had not competed in the primaries. He drew on his support fom within the party apparatus to get the nomination.

5

Good point. It’s not clear that the OP means BEFORE the convention though. Kennedy does provide an example of a nominee presumed to have a lock dying before the convention - a rather confused convention chooses another nominee. Here’s a few more cases to consider:

http://www.doctorzebra.com/prez/a_candidates.htm

The interesting case would be if a candidate died after receiving the nomination, but before the election. I’m not at all certain the VP candidate would automatically be tapped.