Jimmy Carter’s Problematic Primary Legacy

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Jimmy Carter was the first political unknown to secure his party’s nomination and the presidency by winning primary elections. In so doing, he changed American politics—probably for the worse.

Those who vote in primaries differ from a cross-section of the public even when everyone votes and the electorate is evenly divided between two parties. Only half the public votes in either party. The midpoint of opinion among those who cast Democratic ballots is well to the left of that of the public, and the middle position among Republicans voters falls well to the right.

Bias in primary elections is magnified by low participation rates in primary elections. Campaigns can be intense, media coverage extensive, and the competition for the party nomination fierce, but the percentage casting a ballot in primaries can still be surprisingly low. In March 2016, on Super Tuesday, only 24 percent of Illinois adults cast a ballot featuring Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and just 16 percent came to the polls to vote for Donald Trump or one of his Republican opponents. That contrasts with a 57 percent turnout in the general election in Illinois the following November.

Lower turn-out accentuates divisiveness, as those motivated to cast a ballot are often the ones who take more extreme positions on issues. Candidates are thus encouraged to take positions that attract support from those on the edges of the opinion distribution. Depending on party affiliation, borders should either be wide open or a wall should be built; individuals should be banned from carrying guns or machine guns should be made available to all; subsidies for higher education should be eliminated, or college tuition should be abolished.

These are tendencies, not inevitabilities. Moderate candidates can win their party’s nomination if they already hold the presidency, are widely recognized as the next in line for the Oval Office, or their main opponent is painted as an unelectable extremist. What makes Carter of special interest is that he won his party’s nomination and the general election even though he was a nationally unknown former governor from the southern state of Georgia, who took moderate stances on the issues of the day.

Before Carter, obscure political figures from small states, such as Abraham Lincoln, won their party nomination when party bosses found it necessary to work out compromises in the backrooms of convention halls. Primaries did not appear until Oregon introduced the first one in 1908. Other states were hesitant to follow suit: Just 17 elected only 37 percent of the delegates attending the Democratic nominating convention in 1968. Thirty-four percent of Republican delegates were also chosen this way.

In 1968, anti-Vietnam War protests and police thuggery in Chicago prompted major restructuring of the Democratic party’s delegate selection process. The new rules called for proportional representation from each state based upon the share of votes cast in primaries or open-door caucuses. A key designer of the new rules, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, won the party nomination in the next election as an exceptionally liberal, anti-Vietnam War contender, handily disposed of primary opponent, the moderate Senator from Maine, Edmund Muskie. But well to the left of general-election voters, McGovern suffered a crushing defeat.

Learning from the debacle, Carter took a dramatically different approach. His career in politics seemed to have been ended by Georgia’s one-term limit for governors. An ambitious man, he expanded his horizons, announcing a campaign for the presidency two years before the 1976 general election. A full-time campaigner, he entered every primary but the one in West Virginia, traveled widely, and spoke frequently. He concentrated on Iowa’s wide-open caucus and New Hampshire’s primary, correctly anticipating that early wins would multiply media publicity, public recognition, and audience size. Modern momentum theory—those who win early win it all—owes its origin to Carter’s strategic calculations.

Carter scrupulously avoided veering to the left, running instead under the slogan, “America needs a government as good as its people,” a message the country was eager to hear after the trauma of Watergate. Clad in jeans, carrying his luggage as he traveled, the peanut farmer lived the message he preached. A Sunday school teacher who frankly stated he had been born again, he appealed to Evangelical Protestants, an emerging political force. Though he spoke with a southern accent, he escaped the racist charges by embracing the Civil Rights Act and strengthening his ties to the African American church community. He called for lower taxes on all but the rich, proposed creation of a department of education, and took moderately liberal positions on other issues.

To his advantage, opponents relied upon narrow constituencies--George Wallace on the “Old South,” Mark Udall on environmentalists, Henry Jackson on those worried about the Soviet Union, and Jerry Brown, a late-comer to the campaign, on young Californians.

Carter convinced the country that presidential primaries made the country good again. But the basic logic of the primary system which he mastered would eventually take hold, though it would take decades before all the pieces fell into place. Initially, politics did not change dramatically. Bill Clinton did his best to copy Carter, Obama ran only barely to the left of Hillary Clinton, and Republicans deferred to whomever was next in line, whether it be a Bush, Dole, Romney, or McCain. But as the possibilities provided by primaries became increasingly apparent, political forces on the edges of the spectrum gained strength. Primaries enabled Pat Buchanan, Tea Party groups, MAGA activists, and the Freedom Caucus on the right and gave opportunities to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left. Appeals to progressives undermined the popularity of the Biden Administration and the candidacy of Kamala Harris, who might have defeated Trump had Biden pursued more moderate policies ala Bill Clinton.

McGovern designed the modern primary system, but it was Jimmy Carter who showed how to win primaries with a middle-of-the road strategy that yields victory in November’s general election. Ironically, it was Carter’s “goodness” campaign that legitimized a primary system that generates so much divisiveness in today’s politics.

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Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a professor of government at Harvard University.