1976 Presidential election: why was it so close?

[DabbingSanta]

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Looking at the county data I would have to agree with you.  That is one of the reasons why that thread stuck out so much in my mind.  It is amazing one could win so many rural counties yet still "lose" the white vote.  Carter was the last Democrat to win many white southerner's votes.  His outsider status really resonated in the region.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

There is a CBS/New York Times exit poll cited on Wikipedia which has "White South" going to Ford 52-46, although no link is provided.

Anyway, Carter won the former Confederacy by slightly more than 9%, and the Census-defined South by slightly less than 9%.
Considering the plausible ethnoracial demographics of the Southern electorate in 1976, I don't know why it should be unreasonable that Carter lost the non-Hispanic White vote (especially using the "former Confederacy" definition).
Right now I don't have the time and resources for more detailed or complex calculations.

[DabbingSanta]

There is a CBS/New York Times exit poll cited on Wikipedia which has "White South" going to Ford 52-46, although no link is provided.

Anyway, Carter won the former Confederacy by slightly more than 9%, and the Census-defined South by slightly less than 9%.
Considering the plausible ethnoracial demographics of the Southern electorate in 1976, I don't know why it should be unreasonable that Carter lost the non-Hispanic White vote (especially using the "former Confederacy" definition).
Right now I don't have the time and resources for more detailed or complex calculations.

Fair enough.  It is the county maps that make it deceiving. But I guess the same could be said today about Democratic states that only have a half dozen or so counties vote for the winner. 😛

[Gustaf]

Any state with a significant black population that Carter didn't win in a landslide must have had the white vote go for Ford, right? Mississippi for example.

I also think it's pretty clear a Northern liberal could not win during this era. Such a candidate couldn't win the South and Democrats had not yet gotten enough strength outside the South to compensate.

[TDAS04]

The white vote was much more evenly distributed around the country than it is today in terms of who got what percentage in each state.  Here is an old thread of mine.  Shua made a map in which he estimated that Carter carried the white vote in only eight states.  Even if the white vote was fairly close nationally, it is still plausible that Ford carried it in the vast majority of states, and in the South overall.

[Alben Barkley]

I’m still not buying it. It just doesn’t add up. It would be like claiming Joe Biden won the white vote in Georgia this year because he did well in the Atlanta suburbs, even though he got absolutely trounced in the white rural areas of the state. The situation was inverted in the South in 1976 (outside of GA itself of course, where Carter won every county and very obviously won the white vote). I just don’t see how it’s mathematically possible to get those massive rural margins in every Southern state, lose suburbs relatively narrowly, and yet somehow lose the white vote overall. It does not make sense. Maybe it does depend on how broadly you define “the South,” maybe there were enough whites in Dallas or something voting against Carter that it skews things when Texas is included. But number one I still don’t see how it makes sense (Biden won Dallas by more, still lost whites in Texas and the South), and number two even if technically true, it doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of how the stereotypical Southern white voter was voting in 1976. Because that absolutely was for Carter.

And as for the exit polls, well we have different ones saying different things, it’s not clear how reliable they were back then, and again it largely comes down to how you define “the South” which is not consistently agreed upon. All I know for sure, based on the actual results, is that Carter dominated in rural white Southern counties, and (GA excepted) he basically did better in a Southern state the whiter it was. So it just makes absolutely no sense how he could lose Southern whites.

[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.

[MillennialModerate]

Because Carter was a likable guy but a weak canidate.

Muskie would’ve won easily (380+)
Ted Kennedy would’ve won in a landslide (430+)