Nation: Jimmy’s Liability

Can Jimmy Carter get reelected? Writing in Public Opinion, a new bi-monthly published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted Psephologists Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg intriguingly argue that if Carter fails to get his White House lease renewed in 1980, the cause may lie not so much in his performance in Washington as in how he got there in the first place.

Scammon and Wattenberg, who backed Henry M. Jackson for the 1976 Democratic nomination, base their argument on the fact that while several constituencies (notably blacks, Jews and labor) can claim that Carter could not have won “without us,” only white Southerners can say that he succeeded “because of us.” Indeed, the “Scammenberg” thesis is that Southern whites, in giving Carter “the margin of difference,” abandoned their natural conservatism to such a degree that “the great paradox” of 1976 was that Carter ran strongest in the region where recent Democratic presidential candidates had been weakest. Because of white disaffection with liberal national candidates, the percentage of the vote won by Democrats in the eleven Southern states slipped from 50.5% in 1960 to less than 30% in 1972, while the number of electoral votes they received went from 81 to zero. In a smashing reversal of that trend, Carter got 54.1% of the region’s popular vote and 118 electoral votes.

But Carter’s strength in the South in 1976 could be his weakness in the next election: “If those [white] switchers do not —for any reason—vote for him in 1980, it is unlikely that he will win again.” In 1976, the authors argue, Southern whites set aside their conservatism to vote for liberal Carter because they felt “the idea that ‘a Southerner couldn’t be elected President’ was an idea whose time had come —and gone.” Yet would they feel compelled to make that point again? The authors think not, citing the Kennedy experience: after Republican Catholics voted for Democrat John Kennedy in large numbers in 1960 to disprove the notion that a Catholic could not be elected President, Catholicism never again was a major voting issue. Now that Carter has won, Scammon and Wallenberg believe, the Southern issue is dead.

So how will Southerners view Carter in 1980? The authors note that his stands on the Panama Canal, the B-l bomber and SALT certainly dismay conservatives. If his image is perceived as liberal in 1980, they contend, he will be in trouble. Of course, they add, Carter’s vulnerability down home raises a related question: “Is the G.O.P. wise enough, and unified enough, to capitalize on it?”