1976 Elections in the United States

The Event American politicians run for office

Date November, 1976

During the 1976 elections, Jimmy Carter emerged as a front-runner despite being a Washington outsider, and the Republican Party struggled with the legacy of Watergate and economic woes that had emerged during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

The arrival of the 1976 presidential campaign coincided with a transitional time in American history. The United States had just emerged from the Watergate affair that had brought down the administration of Nixon and had Ford in the presidency. Ford’s pardon of Nixon for Nixon’s role in the Watergate affair had divided the nation. The contest between President Ford and challenger Carter was a close, hard-fought one. Ford had been the first president to come to office after the resignation of a president. Carter, an obscure former governor of Georgia, went from being a complete unknown on the national scene to being elected president.

Nomination Campaign

As the 1976 election year began, there was a crisis of leadership in the Democratic Party. The Democrats had no obvious front-runner despite the apparent vulnerability of the Republicans after the demise of Nixon as a result of the Watergate scandal. A number of candidates entered the nomination battle, including former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey and several prominent U.S. senators. Some candidates chose to follow a then-standard tactic to secure the nomination, choosing key states in which they would compete and hoping that they could gain momentum going to the party’s national convention.

Carter, however, developed a new strategy. He concentrated on two early contests, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and developed a strategy to compete thereafter for every delegate in every state. His strategy enjoyed success, as he had already outflanked his challengers before they thought the race had even seriously begun. By the time many major primaries took place, Carter, a relatively unknown politician, had already effectively wrapped up the party’s nomination. As a candidate with no Washington experience, Carter chose U.S. senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his vice presidential running mate. At the end of the convention, public opinion polls suggested that Carter had more than a 30 percent lead over the Republicans.

Meanwhile, President Ford had never run on a national level before 1976. Despite the fact that he was president, he had developed no national constituency because of his manner of coming to office. He had been appointed vice president under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution after Spiro Agnew resigned the post in 1973. Previously, Ford had served as the popular minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives and had run for election only in his home district in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In 1976, Ford decided to run for a full term as president. Although he was the incumbent, he did not have as strong a position to seek reelection as other incumbents had enjoyed: He had not run a national campaign previously, the Republican Party was at a low point after the elections of 1974, and his pardon of Nixon over the Watergate affair had been controversial. As the 1976 campaign began, former governor of CaliforniaRonald Reagan decided to challenge Ford for the Republican nomination. Reagan ran a spirited campaign and was a significant challenger for the nomination. Ultimately, in a very narrow victory, Ford was able to secure the Republican nomination. He then chose not to retain his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, as his running mate but instead turned to Kansas senator Bob Dole as his choice. The Republicans put on a show of party unity during the Republican convention and by the end of the convention, Ford had cut Carter’s lead by half.

General Election Campaign

In the fall campaign, President Ford attempted to take advantage of his status as the incumbent by pursuing a “Rose Garden” strategy: appearing at the White House and demonstrating that the nation was in good hands. He emphasized his decency and integrity and argued that he had restored trust to the White House after Watergate. Carter, in contrast, made leadership his primary issue. He promised the American people that he would never lie to them, a reference to the misrepresentations that had been made during Watergate and its aftermath. He emphasized that he thought it was time to bring an outsider to Washington in order to make it run more efficiently and to provide a clean sweep of the institutions of government.

One of the major issues during the campaign was the performance of the U.S. economy, which had suffered through a recession in 1973-1974 and had been in a state of relatively high inflation and unemployment since that period. Carter argued that the Republicans had mismanaged the economy and that government regulation and commitment to a liberal agenda, including full employment, would bring about a growing economy. Ford pushed for a conservative approach, including tax cuts to stimulate the economy and government spending cuts to keep the deficit down.

Economic policy also guided the approaches of the candidates regarding energy and the environment. Ford advocated the development of nuclear power in order to provide adequate energy for a growing economy. In contrast, Carter thought nuclear power should be kept to a minimum and that few compromises should be made to the environment for the sake of economic growth.

In foreign policy, the United States was still involved in a strategic battle with the Soviet Union. Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was the moving force in a policy of a balance of power and a general distrust of the Soviets. Carter was critical of such an approach, arguing that the United States should have a more open foreign policy that was based in part on morality and human rights. Issue positions were not perhaps the core of the campaign, but the differences between the two candidates were nonetheless real.

Gaffes and Controversies

During the campaign, the candidates engaged in three presidential debates. Generally, the debates were not seen as decisive, but Carter emerged as having a stature at least equivalent to that of the incumbent. Ford made the most obvious mistake during the debates: He wrongfully stated that there was no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, an obvious misstatement of fact and one that he repeated. While the gaffe was not a deciding point in the election, it contributed to the notion that for all of his experience and Carter’s inexperience in national politics, Ford was not clearly more qualified than Carter. It also emphasized the reputation that Ford had developed during his presidency of being a bit clumsy.

For his part, Carter had a controversy of his own during the campaign when he granted an interview to Playboy magazine and made the statement that “I’ve lusted in my heart”; in other words, that he was, by that standard, a sinner according to his religious views. The interview was seen as unseemly by many observers, and the statement was interpreted by many as inappropriate as well. It also underscored the centrality of Carter’s born-again religion to his life. Although it backfired, the statement was meant to make Carter seem like “a man of the people,” with the same feelings and limitations that others had. He felt that in saying this, he would underscore his honesty, his integrity, and the informality that he worked to foster by, for example, carrying his own suitcase and insisting upon being called by his nickname, Jimmy.

A Victory for the Democrats

By the end of the campaign, the election was quite close. In the end, Carter’s huge lead at the beginning of the campaign allowed him to hold on for a victory in the November election. He pulled 50.1 percent of the vote to Ford’s 48 percent and won 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. Carter celebrated by repeating the line that had seemed at first to aspire to an unattainable dream but had become the signature line of his campaign: “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” He also flashed his characteristic toothy grin, a trait that became a major part of the Carter image.

The Democrats were successful in congressional elections as well, picking up a seat in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to enhance their already substantial majorities in each chamber. With the election, Representative Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts ascended to the role of Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Representative Jim Wright of Texas became majority leader. Majority Leader Robert Byrd continued as the most influential member of the Senate. Similarly, the Democrats won a number of gubernatorial elections and increased from thirty-six governors before the election to thirty-seven afterward. All in all, the election was a triumph for Democrats nationwide.

Impact

Carter’s win proved to be the last victory employing the traditional Democratic coalition that had first been put together by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal era of the 1930’s. Carter was able to win many northeastern states, most of the South, and the states of the far West. By 1980, however, the South would move its support to Reagan, and the New Deal coalition would no longer have viability.

The win also marked the succession to the presidency of one of the United States’ most unlikely leaders. Carter went from being a largely unknown figure to the presidency during the course of one campaign. Many of the strategies he employed were innovations developed by him and his staff that later became standard fare in the presidential election process.

Bibliography

Asher, Herbert B. Presidential Elections and American Politics. 5th ed. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1992. This book takes an analytic view of presidential elections and places them in theoretical context. It provides assessments of how to evaluate various campaigns.

Boller, Paul F., Jr. Presidential Campaigns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. This book places presidential campaigns in a historical context, and it recounts a number of anecdotes about the campaign of 1976.

Pomper, Gerald. The Election of 1976: Reports and Interpretations. New York: David McKay, 1977. This book provides an extensive analysis of the election campaign of 1976, with chapters on the nomination campaign, issues in the election, the general election campaign, and the meaning of the election. Charts and graphs are included that show details about the election.

Witcover, Jules. Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1976. New York: Signet Books, 1977. This book, by a prominent journalist, places the 1976 election in the context of the first half of the 1970’s, including an assessment of the role that Watergate played in framing the election of 1976.