Was Ford a strong candidate or was Carter a weak candidate?

[darklordoftech]

In 1976, between Nixon + Ford having been in the White House for 8 years, Watergate, Ford pardoning Nixon, and inflation, the fundamentals were awful for Ford, yet Ford was nearly re-elected.

[Mr. Smith]

Carter was weak.

[Vosem]

All four of the close elections of the Cold War era -- 1948, 1960, 1968, and 1976 -- featured a summertime obvious frontrunner (Dewey, Nixon, Nixon again, Carter) who proceeded to run the dumbest campaign imaginable and produce a draw.

Carter basically won the nomination through a gimmick (by being the first person to realize you could get momentum by focusing on the early contests in an open field), and afterwards was unusually poorly suited to being a national political figure. He was a very weak candidate. (Ford in all honesty was also sort of weak, but not nearly to the same extent as Carter).

[Sumner 1868]

Both but Option 2 is far more important. Carter had no real support outside of Southern Yellow Dogs. He scrambled just enough core Democratic northern states to eke out a victory over Ford. His margins in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Ohio were so thin they should have raised panic buttons in the DNC that they made a terrible mistake. He lost four states that voted for Humphrey in 1968 (CT, ME, MI, WA) and underperformed Humphrey in most of the Northeast and the West while just barely improving in the Midwest.



A Civil War map? No, that's the 1972-1976 trend map. It's very easy seeing how Reagan won when you realize how poor Carter did in the first place. 1976 was a winning flop for the Democratic Party.

As for Ford, he had a friendly persona in an election that was based on personality. Easy to see why he outperformed downballot GOP candidates.