What if there was no Playboy interview of Jimmy Carter in '76

I recently found out that Jimmy Carter in 1976 was leading Ford by 33 points at the DNC, part of the reason the gap narrowed is because he admitted adulterous thoughts in a Playboy interview, damaging his support with women and evangelicals, what if Carter never did the interview? Would it affect the results of the election and would it affect 1980?
 
Maybe the Democrats win a handful of Congressional and Senate races they narrowly lost in OTL. But other than that nothing changes. Carter still wins albiet by a bigger margin, he still does a bad job as President, and he still loses to Reagan in a landslide.
 
I am really skeptical of the "X had a big lead after the convention, but (s)he did much worse in November, therefore the fault must be with X's terrible campaign" narrative that is so common here. As I wrote in a post some time ago (dealing specifically with 1988, where I acknowledge that Dukakis ran a bad campaign but express doubt that this was why he lost):

***
George W. Bush led Al Gore by seventeen points after the GOP convention in 2000. http://www.gallup.com/poll/2338/maj...-election-primary-season-party-conventio.aspx

That he actually lost the popular vote to Gore may be explained in one of three ways: (1) Far from being a genius, Karl Rove was an idiot, and Bush ran an incredibly bad campaign. (2) Al Gore's campaign, so criticized at the time, was absolutely brilliant. (3) Nobody should take huge leads after a party convention too seriously.

I don't think you'll be surprised to learn that I lean toward (3). Other examples besides 1988 and 2000: Jimmy Carter led Ford by 35(!) points after the Democratic convention in 1976. If you will say "Well, the fact that Carter almost lost shows that he was a poor campaigner, too" then consider this--Ronald Reagan led Carter by 28 points after the GOP convention in 1980. https://books.google.com/books?id=DzTvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT115 Yet he ended up winning by "only" ten points. This shows the absurdity of taking such leads seriously. Unless you believe that by a strange coincidence all those candidates with huge post-convention leads were terrible campaigners.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-first-degree-murderers.411266/#post-14345962
 
I am really skeptical of the "X had a big lead after the convention, but (s)he did much worse in November, therefore the fault must be with X's terrible campaign" narrative that is so common here. As I wrote in a post some time ago (dealing specifically with 1988, where I acknowledge that Dukakis ran a bad campaign but express doubt that this was why he lost):

***
George W. Bush led Al Gore by seventeen points after the GOP convention in 2000. http://www.gallup.com/poll/2338/maj...-election-primary-season-party-conventio.aspx

That he actually lost the popular vote to Gore may be explained in one of three ways: (1) Far from being a genius, Karl Rove was an idiot, and Bush ran an incredibly bad campaign. (2) Al Gore's campaign, so criticized at the time, was absolutely brilliant. (3) Nobody should take huge leads after a party convention too seriously.

I don't think you'll be surprised to learn that I lean toward (3). Other examples besides 1988 and 2000: Jimmy Carter led Ford by 35(!) points after the Democratic convention in 1976. If you will say "Well, the fact that Carter almost lost shows that he was a poor campaigner, too" then consider this--Ronald Reagan led Carter by 28 points after the GOP convention in 1980. https://books.google.com/books?id=DzTvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT115 Yet he ended up winning by "only" ten points. This shows the absurdity of taking such leads seriously. Unless you believe that by a strange coincidence all those candidates with huge post-convention leads were terrible campaigners.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-first-degree-murderers.411266/#post-14345962

The reason that candidates initially lead by such a large margin is that they usually tend to get a post-convention bounce, but that lead starts to evaporate as time goes on and voters get to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates. Carter was genuinely a bad campaigner and debater, and this hurt his popularity in the fall campaign. Ditto for Bush 43 and Dukakis. However Carter was helped by a similarly incompetent opponent, a bad economy, and the legacy of Watergate. Without those he certainly would've lost. Dukakis on the other hand was going up against a strong economy, a ferocious Republican campaign, and an opponent who unlike Ford was able to distance himself from the scandals of his predecessor. As for Bush 43, without Brother Jeb's efforts to suppress the Democratic vote in Florida there is no doubt Gore would've scored an upset and become the 43rd President.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I recently found out that Jimmy Carter in 1976 was leading Ford by 33 points at the DNC, part of the reason the gap narrowed is because he admitted adulterous thoughts in a Playboy interview, damaging his support with women and evangelicals, what if Carter never did the interview? Would it affect the results of the election and would it affect 1980?
post convention candidates usually poll really high and if their support drops off by double digits, it's never -one- thing, it's like a 5-6 different things but people 20 years later only remembers one of them
 
. . . Carter still wins albiet by a bigger margin, he still does a bad job as President, . . .
I agree that because of the economy and some personal characteristics (namely, that Jimmy's a control nut!!! :p ), he'll still have an unsuccessful presidency.

But momentum matters. And without the Playboy interview, the move of evangelicals so solidly into the Republican party may be slowed. I'm going to pull a quote from Randall Balmer's book.
 
Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter
By Randall Balmer, 2014

https://books.google.com/books?id=e...Carter acknowledged many years later"&f=false

"It was a devastating blow to our campaign," Carter acknowledged many years later. "In ten days I dropped fifteen percentage points because of that Playboy interview."

W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas, climbed into his pulpit on October 10 to question Carter's judgment . . .
If evangelical Christians more slowly move toward the Republican camp, because of butterflies, they may do so less completely.
 
I recently found out that Jimmy Carter in 1976 was leading Ford by 33 points at the DNC, part of the reason the gap narrowed is because he admitted adulterous thoughts in a Playboy interview, damaging his support with women and evangelicals, what if Carter never did the interview? Would it affect the results of the election and would it affect 1980?

He took a hell of a lot of ribbing over that "I've lusted in my heart" business (I actually remember it), but I don't think it impacted the results of 1980. The term used at the time was "malaise", the sort of national depressive episode brought on by, among other things, the hostage crisis, high interest rates, and this general feeling that Carter wasn't displaying the kind of leadership we needed, or thought we needed, at the time. The Onion summarized the campaign as Reagan's "Let's kill the bastards!" message as getting a lot more traction than Carter's "Let's talk better gas mileage".
 
Yes, Carter lost in a landslide. It was a stunning rebuke to a sitting president. But with John Anderson in the race . . .

Reagan only got 51%.

Carter 41%
Anderson 7%
https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1980

But there's no reason to think that Anderson voters would be unanimously, or even overwhelmingly, for Carter if Anderson weren't running. As Newsweek pointed out after the election, "John Anderson’s impact on the race was largely overshadowed by the broad-based Reagan landslide. It was in one sense tempting to view him as a spoiler; Anderson’s vote was actually greater than Reagan’s margin of victory in thirteen states, among them New York, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Connecticut. But had Anderson not run, Carter would have picked up barely half (49 per cent) of his vote; 37 per cent of Anderson voters said they would have backed Reagan." http://www.salon.com/2011/04/04/third_party_myth_easterbrook/
 
But there's no reason to think that Anderson voters would be unanimously, or even overwhelmingly, for Carter . . .
You are talking my language. :) For example, there was a study of Nader voters in Florida for the 2000 election, which found they would have split 60-40 in favor of Gore. And that’s at the outside. The split may have been even closer. And the two political scientists determined this by looking at electronic snapshots of full ballots and looking at the down-ticket voting.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/lewis/pdf/greenreform9.pdf
“We analyze a collection of 2.95 million Florida county general election ballot images main- tained by the National Election Study.”

Yes, in a super close election, it can make a difference. But it’s not what people think it is. It’s like third-party voters differ by something other then the left-right dimension.
 
Last edited:
I think the comment did have an impact, not just among evangelicals and women (I love that, by the way, "women" - one giant monolithic block, regardless of age, education and creed), but because it gave the opponents something to latch onto and it also showed a lack of judgement that gave some others pause. But if history taught me anything it's that the Liberals in UK are always doomed unless it's an AH TL, and GOP always recovers in OTL. Not a political tangent to derail the thread, but in the days of Obama inauguration I was driving through Tampa, Florida on a work assignment and the local AM radio crypto-far-right brigade were all saying the same thing to criticize Obama - his use of the teleprompter and remember thinking "if this is the worst thing you can say about a man, you're boned." Yeah. No. The teleprompter thing took on a life of its own and turned into a major talking point and led to other things.

All of this to say, it did not sink Carter, in my view, but it had impact and it might have helped some down-the-ballot wins for Dems if Carter had not said it. How much of an impact though, I am not sure.
 
Top