Did Jimmy Carter promising to pardon the Vietnam War draft resistors flip the 1976 election?

[America Needs a 13-6 Progressive SCOTUS]

I would say yes to this. Had Carter not done this, I think he would have lost Ohio and Wisconsin, and with them, the election as a whole.

[brucejoel99]

The pardon promise wasn't so much a new policy as much as it was just a re-confirmation of the Democratic Party's favored policy at the time (i.e. calling for pardons for draft evaders & case‐by‐case reviews for deserters). I don't think it ever actually affected the race in any concrete fashion.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Carter won the South despite making that promise.  The South was the area of the country where this hurt him the most, and he still won.

Carter may well have lost if the campaign ran another two (2) weeks.  The last Gallup poll actually put Ford up by 2 points nationally.  Carter's loss of his lead came from a large number of voters coming to grips with the fact that Carter was not really a conservative, and he would not govern as a conservative.  On top of this, others were coming to grips with the fact that Carter was not truly a liberal Democrat and not much more liberal than Ford.  These voters are the voters that cost Carter California, a state he should have won.  There were some liberal Democrats in California (and, likely, in some of the more liberal Northeast suburbs) that viewed Carter as a disappointment and voted for Ford or abstained because Carter came across as "half a Democrat".

It's more likely that by the time election day 1976 came around the sorting out process was completed.  A longer election process MAY have cost Carter Mississippi, but it may have gained him California and Connecticut.  We'll never know.  The 1976 campaign turned out to be a game of inches. 

[SingingAnalyst]

Perhaps. The election was so close it could have turned on anything.

According to an aggregate of polls, Carter won 21-29 year-olds, the age group most affected by the pardon policy, by about 52-45. All other age groups were very closely divided.