The South in 1980?

[barfbag]

The south is where the election would've been decided if things were a couple points closer. Carter won a few states there and was very close in most others with the exception of TX, FL, and VA. I'm going to do a map based on if Dole was the nominee now.

[barfbag]

OK, Carter is a Southener. But what about Al Gore? He carried zero confederacy states.

And Carter? He is pro-civil rights for blacks, against capital punishment, environmentalist and pro legalization of marijuana.

Maybe, in some issues, Carter is more liberal than Gore.

Why did Carter have much better results among white southeners than Gore?

Did the political orientation of white southeners change from 1976 and 1980 to 2000?

Different times and Gore ran after 8 years of a Democrat.

[barfbag]

On the Al Gore thing, there are a lot of differences between 1980 and 2000.

In 1980 Carter was the only southerner running and still had some appeal in the south over Reagan because of that. But in 2000 there were two southerners running and Bush seemed like more of a true southerner than Gore because he was more conservative and hadn't been in Washington for the past eight years.

Not only that but in 1980 the south was in transition. We didn't see it throughout the 70's and 80's because 4 out of the 5 elections were GOP landslides and the one that wasn't was a Democrat landslide in the south. Had things been closer, we could've seen the south continuously shift to the right in the 70's and 80's.

[barfbag]

He seems to have hurt Carter more in the northeast when looking at numbers, but one would think it would be the opposite. In the south, Anderson was hardly a factor.

[barfbag]

Was there a post-Carter effect?

Mondale was not as bad in the Southern states as McGovern was. Mondale was close to his national average in the South.

Or did it happen only because black turnout was higher in 1984 than it was in 1972?

McGovern was about 7 points worse nationwide so there's a difference already. He was also seen as a wild-eyed liberal where Mondale was seen as liberal, but not over the top. Mondale's other problem was that he was also seen as a very dull and boring candidate.

[barfbag]

He seems to have hurt Carter more in the northeast when looking at numbers, but one would think it would be the opposite. In the south, Anderson was hardly a factor.

Anderson was an extremely key factor in the South, in that just about every Anderson vote was an otherwise Democratic vote.

Had every Anderson vote in the South went to Carter, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee would have gone to Carter.  Alabama would have gone GOP by a hair by the numbers, but if Anderson had not been running, it would have been close.

Carter lost the 1980 election by not being able to preempt the Kennedy challenge to his renomination.  This was a huge political failure, and a preventable one.  The failure ultimately rests with Carter, but a whole lot of Democratic politcians still swooning over Camelot failed to take a long range view of what they were doing.  I can't think of a single President that encountered a full-bore challenge to his renomination that prevailed in November from the 20th century onward

He wasn't significant in the sense he didn't get over 5% much of anywhere in the south. Even without Kennedy challenging him there's the economy which Carter described as a "malaise that may not get better." Can you imagine if George W. Bush would've said that the economy is a malaise that may not get better? Look at Carter's approval ratings leading up to the election. No president could've gotten re-elected with such numbers. I can't think of a president since Carter who has faced such a challenge in the primaries either. However, I can't think of a president who did as poorly or presided over worse times than Carter either. Even if you say Bush was worse, it was his second term that was deemed as bad, not his first term.