Amid all the reminiscences this week about former President Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at age 100, surprisingly little attention has focused on just how brilliant a campaign he ran to secure the Democratic nomination in 1976.
When the campaign began, Carter was the longest of long shots. He entered a crowded field filled with politicians of established national repute, while the overwhelming polling favorites, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Ted Kennedy, waited in the wings as undeclared candidates. Humphrey, who was the nominee in 1968 and earned the largest Democratic popular vote in 1972 (while losing badly, however, in the delegate count), clearly was interested in being “drafted” but never actually announced his campaign. Hundreds of delegates elected as “uncommitted,” though, were well understood to be for Humphrey, making his shadow campaign quite viable.
Carter couldn’t fashion himself as the sole favorite son of the South because repeat candidate George Wallace of Alabama was again in the field, with significant support. Carter couldn’t run as a leftist because nominee George McGovern, four years earlier, had shown by losing 49 states that hard leftism was electoral anathema. He couldn’t pretend to outcompete the defense hawk Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington among the Democratic Party’s still-significant wing of strongly anti-Communist union members. He didn’t have the personality to charm people nearly as effectively as did the witty liberal U.S. Rep. Mo Udall, who hailed from a long-prominent Democratic family. Nor could he match the public policy accomplishments of the attractive Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, who also was famous for pulling a badly injured Kennedy from the wreckage of a 1964 plane crash.
Carter and campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan, though, utilized five key political insights, all of them relatively new to presidential politics at the time. First, they started their campaign at what was then considered an outlandishly early point, December 1974, nearly two years before the election. Campaigns usually began much later in those days: For comparison’s sake, on the Republican side, Ronald Reagan didn’t announce his challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford until November 1975 and still came within a whisker of winning.
Second, they realized that a party traditionally dominated by insider political machines was ripe for a reformist, outsider’s message in the wake of the Watergate scandal that left a stench not just on former President Richard Nixon but on all of Washington, D.C.
Third, they realized that a combination of new-ish party rules and a post-Watergate media frenzy could make the earliest contests much more determinative of the final outcome than ever before. In 1972, Maine’s Sen. Edmund Muskie handily won both the Iowa caucuses, which the media essentially ignored, and the New Hampshire primary (along with the quite-early Illinois primary as well), but still finished a weak fourth overall to McGovern and others. Carter, though, virtually camped out in the previously unimportant Iowa, won a large plurality there, and then insisted to the ultra-engaged media that Iowa was a big deal. Parlaying that attention into momentum for the famous New Hampshire primary, Carter upset Udall there while Jackson and Wallace considered the Granite State contest too unimportant to make an effort in. The Iowa-New Hampshire back-to-back wins suddenly made the virtually unknown Carter into a media-driven front-runner, even as Humphrey still bided his time.
Fourth, Carter was the first candidate since William Jennings Bryan 75 years earlier to awaken evangelical voters, who were numerous both in Iowa and across the South. The media didn’t even know at first what it meant to be a “born-again Christian,” as Carter regularly identified himself. But before the 1980 Moral Majority used the abortion issue to move conservative Christians to Republicans, most of them were legacy Democrats feeling ignored by the national party. Carter benefited greatly in the primaries by genially but consistently wearing his faith on his sleeve.
Fifth, Carter realized the increasing voter registration and participation by black Southerners could help him, a supporter of civil rights, cut into the racist Wallace’s stronghold there while making him attractive to Northern liberals. With the combination of white “born-agains” and newly active black voters, Carter beat Wallace in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
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Even with all that going for him, though, Carter still had to struggle. Back then, candidates could enter late and still be threats to win at the national convention. California Gov. Jerry Brown didn’t even announce his candidacy until March 16 of the election year, and Idaho Sen. Frank Church entered two days later, yet each won at least three primaries and kept Carter from consolidating his victory.
That Carter still emerged from all these thickets as the Democratic nominee, and then as the president, was a testament to stunningly astute politicking. His success in the first truly “modern” presidential primary process set the template for campaigns — announce early, focus on Iowa and New Hampshire, and compete in every contest — for the next four full decades. Carter ended up being a not-good president, but students of the political arts should study Carter’s 1976 campaign for many decades to come.