The story of the '76 general election (post-conventions) was really two converging parts. One was the collapse of Carter -- a major Democratic Party operative, can't remember who now, said Carter could've gone back to Plains and fished after the convention and won by ten points, but instead he campaigned and damn near lost. The other was the comeback of Ford. That second ingredient had several elements. One was that Republicans were already showing signs of "tighter" partisan alignment than Democrats other than some of the old-school liberal Republicans, some of whom were already starting to call themselves "independents" as the party drifted rightward. They did in fact "come home" to Ford despite the bitterness of the Ford-Reagan civil war. Another ingredient was Ford's self-promotion in the fall, a series of really quite good TV ads and even half-hour buys of time where Ford simply sat and was interviewed about various topics by Ford's good friend and ex-baseball player TV personality Joe Garagiola. This did an important and underrated job of creating the "regular guy" vibe around Ford so beloved of low-information, late-deciding voters. And Ford reaped the benefits of Carter's collapse in two ways, most directly as independents and late-deciders began to flee towards the familiar which was Ford. The other was that, as Carter's public image soured, left-wing Democrats deserted him to protest-vote for Eugene McCarthy, making a vanity run as an independent with a political platform that sounded more like a libertarian Republican than the guy from 1968. (But, then, McCarthy was first, last, and always about McCarthy. He truly was, as one trenchant critic put it, a "wrecker" before all else.)
And that ties back in to Carter's collapse. The Playboy interview was idiocy, and so was much of Carter's fall campaign, which stumbled about and temporized and thought it knew better than the party leadership and coordinated poorly with labor and minority leaders who, along with friendly Southern governors who saw one of their own headed for the White House, turned out the popular vote majority that Carter
did win in spite of himself. A little while back there was a "Make Carter's Presidency Better" thread and I wrote some long-form stuff in it. The heart of it was that, for his whole active political career, Carter was at war with himself, his genuinely good qualities battling against his genuinely bad qualities. The presidency changed him, as it changes all those who occupy it, and in his case much more for the better than average with presidents. But that came with a learning curve that had great cost to him, his party, and the country. In the fall of '76 it was classic Carter-versus-Carter, with the "kooky", sanctimonious, relentlessly ambitious, cold-shouldering side of him coming out just when the voting public needed to see the industrious, hyper-competent, quietly devout, dogged, optimistic side of him instead. It was murder on his poll numbers, and the tight-knit team of talent that had won him so many primaries while the other Democratic candidates were in disarray translated poorly to the context of a single national-level campaign (it even happened again in 1980 as he did "whip Kennedy's ass" everywhere outside New England, New York, and the West Coast, then hobbled through the national effort bleeding support to Anderson.) Carter needed to avoid the
Playboy interview like hell -- write them a long-form essay instead, they actually published some good stuff in those days including the best journalistic takedown of Jim Garrison's homophobic snipe hunt for a JFK conspiracy ever published -- treat McCarthy as an actual problem and show waverers how a vote for him is a vote for the party of Nixon and Reagan, and run a series of ads riffing off the themes that worked so well for Carter in the primaries to keep independents on side with the best cure for the "regular guy" meme, the "come be part of something awesome!" meme.
Even then, the whole "landslide" thing is questionable. It's just the voting demographics of the race. I'll go out on a limb here and say that to qualify as a "landslide" you need a spread of support across the country sufficient to net at least 400 Electoral College votes. You can have dominating wins with less than that (like Obama's, especially in '08 where there was a landslide involved but it was downticket particularly in the Senate) but "landslide" territory is north of the 400 watermark. The last person to even manage that is Bush the Elder, and that was a near-run thing: Dukakis
just lost Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, and probably also Missouri to the bandwagon of late-deciders going Bush, which in a more competitive race in the late stages would have pushed Bush's EC numbers down into the 300s, a convincing win but not a humiliating one. So in 1976 the historical election results look like this:
That produced a result of Carter 297, Ford 241 in the Electoral College, and Carter winning the popular vote by roughly 2%. A massive comeback on Ford's part and a major collapse on Carter's. In particular, when you look at state voting data, Carter very clearly lost Oregon, Iowa, and Maine to left-leaning Democrats who protest-voted for McCarthy or other write-ins (he damn near lost Ohio the same way but held on in the end.) Additionally, when you combine those protest voters with Carter's terrible poll numbers with late deciders, the one-two punch of that cost him Illinois, Colorado, and Oklahoma as well. If he makes better choices from the convention through the fall, probably all of that can be arrested, which results in a map that looks like this:
That's an Electoral College result of Carter 356, Ford 182. Certainly much more convincing and more in keeping with the polling numbers from the summer even if you toss out the irrational exuberance after the convention. But in terms of state-level voting that was about the maximum of what Carter could achieve. Washington was probably
just out of reach even with a drop in the McCarthy vote and more late-Carter-deciders. It's still a maybe, but a poor maybe. He had a better shot at New Jersey, where changing hands with just 1% of the vote would have put it in tossup territory, so it's quite possible that a determined effort there could make a difference (there was some drag from the unpopularity at the time of Governor Brendan Byrne, who then made a storming comeback to win reelection in the next cycle.) The other strong candidate is Virginia, where Ford and Carter were separated by 1.33%. (Fun fact, the
Socialist Worker's Party actually won 1.06% of the Virginia vote that year. Let's hear it for urban black nationalists and aging hillbilly Communists from the Thirties. Respect.) In those two states, both separated by just over 1% of the vote, Carter could reasonably have ridden late momentum to a narrow victory. That would look like this:
Which is Carter 385, Ford 153.
Wow that's an east-west divide once you correct for Ford being from Michigan and Texas and Oklahoma being as culturally Southern as large parts of them are. And it is also the absolute best Carter can really do. California is just not there yet. It's a battleground state unless a Californian is running: in both 1976 and 1988 the end result was roughly Republican 51%, Democrat roughly 48%. So there are lots of Democratic strongholds and millions of Democratic voters in California. But the state
as a whole was not yet demographically in a place where a Democrat could take it unless you were (1) running against Barry Goldwater or (2) had Ross Perot mixing things up for you. It's only in the mid-Nineties when both the census numbers and the hard-right agenda of most of the CAGOP and especially its leadership (from Pete Wilson on down a ways) really converge to create the large and seemingly permanent (or at least
very long-term) Democratic majority that we know from California in our times. So that map just above here, that's really the absolute best that Carter could expect to do in '76. It is a hell of a lot better than he
did do, and it is entirely feasible given a fall campaign run just mostly as well as his primary campaigns. But it was a sign of things to come that the flaws revealed in the autumn of '76 did the damage they did.