1976 Presidential election: why was it so close?

[Fuzzy Bear]

I was alive and politically active for the 1976 campaign.  I was a Carter supporter in NY's primary on the basis that I viewed him as the most electable Democrat.  The trick was to get the rest of the Democratic Party to come to see this.

What caused Carter's lead to diminish from 33 points to 2 points was, indeed, the superior Gerald Ford campaign.  What should be noted is what the nature of that campaign was.

The most successful theme used against Carter was the the idea that Carter was "wishy-washy".  This term was used over and over again; it was used to show Carter as not being as conservative as he claimed to be with Southern audiences, while showing Carter as standing on both sides of the abortion issue, causing a lot of socially liberal voters on the West Coast and in Northeastern suburbs to vote Ford because he was socially more liberal.  (Carter's religiosity scared some of the more liberal voters in 1976.)  It caused conservatives to conclude that Carter was not a conservative, liberals to doubt that he was an actual mainstream Democrat (despite the support of liberals like William Vanden Heuvel and blacks like Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr.), but a "Southern Democrat" whose views were those of Connally's Democrats for Nixon.  Moderate voters came to view Carter as the guy who they disagreed with on the issue that meant the most to THEM; at least with Ford, they knew where they stood.  (Given the strength of Ted Kennedy's 1980 primary challenge, it's clear that those doubts of liberals were never assuaged.)

In the end, "Southern Pride" won the election for Carter.  In no small measure, this is part of the reason that the South remained Carter's strongest region in 1980.  Liberal Democrats never really accepted the fact that Carter was likely the most liberal Democrat America would have elected in 1976 and they never accepted that, at the time, they were not going to prevail in any Presidential election without the support of a majority of the Southern states. 

The "wishy-washy" narrative was wildly successful.  I believe that Ford would have won had the election gone on for 2 more weeks.