Presidential election, November 1976

Whatever else may be said about the 1976 presidential campaign, most people agree that the only exciting thing about it was the election itself.

By twilight on Tuesday, the only positive people on either side were campaign workers, press secretaries, relatives and friends who have an obvious obligation to maintain the team spirit, whatever the facts may say. And, among the general public, wise guys, true believers and chronic loudmouths to whom wishing something hard enough will make it come true. Everybody else, from journalists, politicians on both sides, professors of political science, all the way up to the most reliable of the pollsters, namely Lou Harris, gave up in the end and said that the election was too close to call. 

Most of us who've been watching the ebb and flow of partisanship in the 50 states could make out a list early on Tuesday evening and write down only two or three absolutely sure things. Massachusetts, for instance, the only state to go for the Democratic nominee in 1972, was written off by the Republicans long before election day as sacrosanct Democratic territory. Apart from its normal Democratic allegiance, there was the powerful fact that Senator Edward Kennedy was running for re-election and would almost certainly carry the state by a landslide and carry Carter with him. Which he did. Georgia would plainly have gone slightly mad if it had not voted for its own son, Carter, the most improbable presidential candidate in the history of the states or perhaps in the history of the United States. 

We also made the not-very-risky guess that with a Southerner having the best chance at the presidency in over a hundred years, Carter might relax the solid grip on the South that Nixon had managed last time. By the way, I ought not to toss off that Nixon feat so glibly because the reversal of it explains, so far as I can see, more about Carter's election than anything else. Nixon's capture of the entire South in 1972 was about as remarkable as if the Conservatives, in the last British election, had won every Labour seat from Birmingham to the North. Let me go into this. 

All the way back too 1880, the Republicans have had to confront every four years not only an uphill fight for the presidency, but a high stone wall in the middle of the hill and that wall was known as 'the Solid South' – the absolute certainly that every state of the South would vote for the Democratic presidential nominee no matter who he was. This had nothing to do with political principle or ideology. It had everything to do with the machinations of the Republicans in the decade after the Civil War. They descended on the South like locusts and tried to organise the new, huge Negro vote – the Negroes, of course, had been enfranchised for the first time and their success was alarming – alarming, that is, to the whites. 

In the 1870s the whites who, themselves, were deprived of the vote for a time in some Southern States, the whites rallied together behind the Democratic Party simply because it was the resistance force against the invading Republicans and, for more than 30 years after the Civil War, the South stayed loyal to the Democrats in every presidential election and state election. Now what this meant in political terms was that Democrats, whether or not they shared any political prejudice with the Democrats of the North, entrenched themselves in state politics, in the governor's mansions, in city and local politics. They obviously controlled the state's legislatures, the town halls, the counties, the works. They, therefore, owned the patronage which gives people political jobs and can assign contracts, whether it's a skyscraper permit or a new highway or whatever. And when you have a governor and a state legislature and city mayors, all of the same party, it's clearly going to be very difficult to break that party with promises of jobs and power since that party doesn't need promises, it already owns the jobs and the power. 

And this explains why, far into this century, Southerners who are even feverishly sympathetic to Republican principles and who detested, for instance, Roosevelt and later Truman, stayed with the Democratic Party because they had established over the very long run similar overwhelming power in Congress. Until the past few years, the chairmen of congressional committees, where the real work of Congress is done, were appointed chairmen through length of service, so it's obvious that if a Southern State had been sending a couple of Democrats back to the Senate, year after year, decade after decade, those two would become and remain chairmen of the most powerful congressional committees. 

The first break in this stranglehold came with Eisenhower who shook the Democrats by taking four Southern States in 1956 and also Texas, a south-western state with a Southern prejudice. In 1960, Nixon took only three, but four years later Goldwater took five. In '68 Nixon again took five, but in 1972 the political battle was joined so sharply between Nixon, the conservative, and McGovern, the leftist liberal, that the whole South proclaimed itself the new bastion of conservatism and every Southern state and Texas went for Nixon. 

So, even after the Spiro Agnew resignation and the Nixon disgrace – by the way, only five per cent of the voters said Watergate was an issue this time – it seemed early this year that no Democrat could possibly pierce what was now a solid Republican South unless, the polls showed, the Democratic nominee was Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. I heard of more bets which are now being reluctantly paid off on that simple premise that no Democrat, other than Kennedy, could possibly unseat Ford. 

Well, enter now – as the stage directions used to say – a man from a very small town in Georgia, population 680-odd, a prosperous peanut farmer who was, however, also, a former nuclear submarine commander. A name most of us had never heard a year ago, even though he'd been a highly controversial governor of Georgia, some saying that he had at least reduced the vast number of bureaux in the Georgia state government, others saying that he'd done that but the fewer bureaux had actually increased the number of bureaucrats by 30 per cent and the cost to the taxpayer by 50 per cent. 

Well, the rest of the astonishing story you know. How, by the end of the Democratic convention, Carter was over 30 percentile points ahead of Ford, how Ford came back and back and back, until the double-dome pollsters threw up their hands on the very eve of the election and said it was a dead heat. 

When we sat down – we're back now to Tuesday twilight – we gave California to Ford because all the Democratic managers out there said the state was lost. I made a preliminary tally giving 18 states to Carter with an electoral vote of 197 and 24 states to Ford with an electoral count of 223. That would require Ford to get only 47 more electoral votes from the, admittedly, toss-up states of Texas (26), Pennsylvania (27), Illinois (26) and five others with almost negligible numbers of electoral votes – Connecticut, South Dakota, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Mississippi. 

Electoral votes are distributed on the basis of the number of representative in Congress which, in turn, is based on population. So California, the most populous state, had 45 votes to give to Ford, as New York, the second most populous, had 41 to give to Carter. Now, when you settle down to the long vigil of a presidential evening, you expect the early returns to go for the Republican and that's because the first returns come in from the rural areas of the Eastern states and the farmers, on the whole, have a strong Republican bias. But here an odd thing happened and, as the evening wore on, we should have seen it as a sign of things to come. 

Carter established an early lead in the popular vote by 51 per cent to 48 per cent and he held it, hour after hour, for eight hours until the election was decided. As we watched NBC's big, empty map of the country filling in with red states for Carter and blue for Ford, a pattern became glaringly clear. The South was returning to the fold and if Ford was to win, he was going to have to wrest most of the big industrial states and/or Texas and/or California from the Democrats. When Carter took New York and then Pennsylvania, it began to look as if it were all over. And then he took Texas and his electoral lead was commanding. Ford was now going to have to take almost everything, certainly all the neck and neck, big races. Well, he took California and then Illinois. And then, little Mississippi came in and put Carter over by two votes. 

On Wednesday morning, we woke up to find that Carter was still president but by only two electoral votes, that Oregon, only six votes, but Ohio with 25 were still tied too close to call. If Ford took both, the final electoral count would be Carter 272, Ford 266, the closest electoral vote in history. Woodrow Wilson won in 1916 by only 23. 

Well, what happened since then, you all know. There’s always one unsuspected, massive trend that nobody spots and we, all, including the pollsters, kept saying to the dead-heat prophets that though the popular vote would be as close as a hair's breadth, Carter would probably have a very comfortable electoral majority. Well, in the result, Carter had an easy two million majority in the popular vote and squeaked through the electoral vote, which is what counts. 

At this, still bleary-eyed, stage, my own explanation is simple, if tentative. Carter only partly revived the old Democratic majority in the cities, but he broke the new Republican grip on the South – most of all, he broke the old Republican grip on rural America.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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