Worst possible winner of the 1976 presidential election?

Worst Possible Winner

  • Jerry Brown

    Votes: 4 3.4%
  • Robert Byrd

    Votes: 8 6.8%
  • Frank Church

    Votes: 1 0.8%
  • Gerald Ford

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Hubert Humphrey

    Votes: 6 5.1%
  • Scoop Jackson

    Votes: 2 1.7%
  • Ted Kennedy

    Votes: 5 4.2%
  • Ronald Reagan

    Votes: 23 19.5%
  • Mo Udall

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • George Wallace

    Votes: 48 40.7%
  • Some other candidate (please explain your reasoning)

    Votes: 3 2.5%
  • Actually, Jimmy Carter was the worst possible president for those years

    Votes: 18 15.3%

  • Total voters
    118
The good thing about Reagan winning is that he’d be discredited by 1980.

I think even if Reagan handles things better and the economy is improving by election day, after 12 years of the GOP voters will really want change.

Losing to Ford in 1976 might've been the best thing that happened to Reagan, outside of surviving his assassination attempt.
 
upload_2018-12-27_15-30-51-png.428631

U.S. Economy, GDP Growth Rate

When Star Wars opened on Wednesday, May 25, 1977, the U.S. economy was growing at 4.5%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RO1Q156NBEA

432704b8b8f9fd8bbd9fd01e24240c01.jpg


Photo at San Francisco’s Coronet Theatre on Saturday, May 28, 1977. And there are a bunch more by photographer Gary Fong:
https://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent...et-are-you-in-these-1977-photos/#photo-159499

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sf...oronet-center-of-Star-Wars-galaxy-4543111.php

‘ . . . one of just 32 theaters in the United States to premiere the film. . . ’

https://www.in70mm.com/library/engagements/film/s/star_wars/index.htm

‘ . . . additional bookings added over the ensuing two days which brought its opening weekend engagement total to 43. . . ’
Executives at Twentieth Century-Fox had real doubts about the film . . . you’ve probably heard this before!

Or . . .

20th Century-Fox’s Gareth Wigan said, "Star Wars only opened in forty theaters because we could only get forty theaters to book it. That's the astonishing thing."

————————-

In any case . . .

the above graph shows it was not the case that all of the late ‘70s were blah economically. Things did not get bad till stagflation in ‘79, and then the double-dip recession of ‘80 & ‘82.
 
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Voted for "some other candidate". If we're including everybody, Lester Maddox's obscure third-party bid really was the worst.

Let me refer back to the beginning of this thread...

You are free to suggest other possibilities, and certainly there is someone out there who would have been unarguably worse than anyone included in the poll, but keep in mind that they need to plausibly win the 1976 election before doing any damage, or at least be a plausible addition to their party's ticket who could then assume the presidency in the event of a vacancy.

I cannot imagine a scenario - at least, not one with a point of divergence before the mid-to-late 1970s - where Lester Maddox could plausibly be elected as President. I can certainly picture Maddox performing better than he did in 1976 had the Democrats nominated a noted liberal and/or non-Southerner and Ford somehow pissed off conservatives even more than IOTL, but he certainly would not match even Wallace’s 1968 showing.

The only remotely plausible scenario I can think of that sees a third party candidate elected in 1976 would be one where the Democrats nominate George Wallace and Republicans nominate Ronald Reagan. Charles Mathias decides to actually join the race as an independent as he had been considering, calculating that the sheer number of disaffected moderate and liberal voters in both parties might make him legitimately competitive. Sprinkle in a few major gaffes and missteps for the two major party candidates and strong running mate for Mathias, and victory might be just within the realm of plausibility for him.

You could probably apply the same template for an Anderson victory in 1980 to a Mathias victory in 1976, as this electoral map created by @Ariosto illustrates:

FC0EB59C-8DEC-4A24-AF08-CF5F0016FBFE.png


Read the whole scenario that he developed here.

Now, to return to the point of this thread, whether Mathias would have been a particularly bad president is certainly up for debate.
 
George Wallace. Have his assassination attempt fail so he's not wheelchair bound. He campaigns as a populist in 1976 and barely secures the nomination. Reagan defeats Ford for the nomination, leading to Jacob Javits and Henry Jackson running an independent unity ticket.
genusmap.php
 
George Wallace. Have his assassination attempt fail so he's not wheelchair bound. He campaigns as a populist in 1976 and barely secures the nomination. Reagan defeats Ford for the nomination, leading to Jacob Javits and Henry Jackson running an independent unity ticket.

But if Wallace has a real chance of winning the Democratic nomination (which I doubt very much regardless of his health) he's going to attract some OTL Reagan Republican primary voters to the Democratic primary, which will make it even harder than in OTL for Reagan to defeat Ford.
 
But if Wallace has a real chance of winning the Democratic nomination (which I doubt very much regardless of his health) he's going to attract some OTL Reagan Republican primary voters to the Democratic primary, which will make it even harder than in OTL for Reagan to defeat Ford.

I actually think that Reagan winning the Republican nomination, under the right circumstances, could help facilitate Wallace’s victory during the Democratic primary season rather than hindering it. It sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. You are right that the two candidates often drew support from the same set of voters, especially in the South, but that does not tell the whole story.

See, during the early stretch of primaries, Reagan was sort of floundering. Ford had won New Hampshire, which was arguably a bit of an upset, and then crushed his opponent in several more contests. The Gipper’s campaign was only saved by the Jesse Helms machine in North Carolina, which helped deliver that state and allow Reagan to remain competitive up until the convention... and which also depended, in part, on mobilizing diehard Wallace supporters to vote in the Republican primary. So, the Wallace factor took some time to fully get behind Reagan.

But imagine that, for whatever reason, Reagan absolutely crushes Ford in New Hampshire, forcing the president out of contention in the early running. With Reagan’s nomination all but assured, turnout is much lower during the Republican primary season. What are the knock-on effects of this? Well, it frees up many Wallace supporters to actually vote for Wallace in the Democratic primaries. In fact, the impact might be almost instantaneous. Look at the Democratic primary in Massachusetts - Wallace came within striking distance of winning that contest. One would not need to shift that many voters to his column (perhaps unaffiliated but culturally conservative blue collar voters) to give him the victory. Sure, Wallace would not win that many more delegates, but it would surely be a result that generates much media attention and build him momentum. That, plus the Wallace voters in Southern states who would have no need to strategically back Reagan, could help make him knock out Carter early on and become one of the frontrunners. Now, it is admittedly something of a leap from “one of the frontrunners” to “Democratic presidential nominee”, but the scenario positions Wallace to be a serious contender.
 
He was not my final choice, but I am surprised that Scoop Jackson has gotten no votes whatsoever. Folks should keep in mind that he was a huge hawk, possibly the most likely plausible winner to get America involved in a war in Iran or elsewhere. On domestic policy, he probably would have governed similarly to the George Wallace of that era, given his opposition to busing and emphasis on "law and order." Even considering the totality of both of their political careers up to that point, Jackson does not come off looking incomparably better than Wallace. He was never a segregationist, but he was a strong supporter of Japanese internment during World War II.

You are, here, assuming that a war with Iran would have been a disaster for the USA. A ground war would have been but an air and naval war wouldn't.
If I was USA President when the hostage crisis began, I would have immediately sent Khomeini an ultimatum, demanding that he ordered the students to release the hostages, or, else, there would be war.
If it came to war, I would have ordered air strikes against Iranian governmental and military infraestructure and a naval blockade.
I suspect that's what Jackson would have done, too.
Like Scoop Jackson, I'm very liberal on many things but I'm hardline on other things and taking embassies hostage is one of those things.
Scoop Jackson was very different from Wallace, he was a strong supporter of civil rights.
 
I would have to go with Ronald Reagan. The country was having economic problems and he was not capable of handling them.
The policies he used in the 1980s in championed in 1976 would have been a total disaster. Is interventionist policies in Central America so shortly after the Vietnam War would not have gone over well, people would be upset over the potential of the direct involvement of American troops.

I would also say Reagan, but for slightly different reasons. The economic turmoils of the second half of the decade would have likely meant that he'd have resorted to the cultural warrior card, which may well have succeeded (given his political and electioneering skills) in getting him a second term, particularly if the Democrats nominate someone with a 'liberal elitist' image in 1980. A 1977-1985 Reagan presidency could very easily have been worse from a left-wing POV than the one in OTL.
 
No goddamn way Mathais beats Reagan in California, and Wallace would win at least Alabama, if not a comparable amount of the south as Carter

Also the worst scenario/president is this:
Mathais runs as a Republican, splitting the vote for Ford in several states, causing a narrow Reagan victory. Meanwhile, either Frank Church gets started earlier or Henry M. Jackson gives a shit in Iowa/New Hampshire and the ABC (anyone but Carter) movement succeeds. However, in order to appease the South, they pick Edwin Edwards (who gave Louisiana's delegates to Jerry Brown OTL) because Democrats take about four losses from one issue to actually change. Mathais runs third-party, and the McCarthy and Maddox campaigns actually pick up a little bit more. Mathais wins Vermont or something, and McCarthy picks up Alaska (left-libertarianism ftw), the Electoral College stalls, and because Democrats owned congress in '76, Edwards and his running mate still win. Still, he loses the EC and PV, and didn't win a single contest in the '76 primary, so he's seen as illegitimate before he even enters congress. Even with Carter's hand, he probably fucks up enough with corruption it screws over the Democrats, forever.
 
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