After Jimmy Carter won the presidency, Democrats lost the South

On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 — and landed Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.”

But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Carter, the one-term Democratic president who died Sunday at 100, would be forced to listen rather helplessly as Republicans mostly called the tune in his native South, supported by white voters who were uncomfortable with Democrats’ embrace of racial inclusion and abortion rights, and were attracted to the small-government, low-tax promises of the party of Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, after Carter’s ascension to the White House, the states of the old Confederacy would go on to become, with a few exceptions, a crucial base of support for Republican presidential candidates. Much of that support came from Carter’s fellow Southern evangelicals, who turned sharply away from him and the Democrats during his presidential term. They became one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs and remain so to this day.

That was part of a shift that had begun in the early 1960s, as Republicans found a way to chip and then blast away at what had been a solidly Democratic South since the end of Reconstruction. Southerners’ fealty to the party had been based on their appreciation for Roosevelt’s New Deal, and their bitterness over the 19th century Republicanism of Lincoln that helped erode the region’s strict racial hierarchies.

Yet Carter also helped to create a model for Democratic success in a South that has become increasingly Republican‚ a model that remains workable to varying degrees today. The election of 1976 was one of a number of times that a Democratic candidate has emerged with just the right balance of rhetoric and policy promises, uniting just enough white Southern progressives and white moderates in a successful coalition with Black and other minority voters.

Carter’s home state has provided some of the best recent examples, including President Joe Biden’s razor-thin victory in Georgia in November 2020 and the subsequent elections of Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

But it is rarely easy to pull off, and for years, Carter’s legacy — or, at least, the way it was framed by his political opponents — did not do much to help. Pointing to a Carter presidency that was plagued by an energy crisis and a recession, Republicans have delighted in warning voters that later Democratic candidates such as Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale might be “another Jimmy Carter.”

Around the region, the Democratic brand can sometimes be so toxic that the party’s own Southern nominees would tiptoe around associations with the leading lights of the national party, including President Barack Obama.

President Bill Clinton, the only other Southerner elected to the White House since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, regularly shunned and slighted Carter, who arguably paved the way for him.

At the same time, Carter’s career helped define a template for Democratic success at the state level, one characterised by careful centrism and the rhetoric of inclusion. The formula has been successfully deployed by dozens of Southern Democratic candidates from the 1970s onward, and some Democrats still see it as the best — and perhaps only — way to win in certain Southern states.

All along, Carter remained a moral beacon for Southern progressives with his long, faith-fueled, good works-focused postpresidency.

For Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Carter’s wipeout 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan demonstrated that Carter was out of sync with much larger forces afoot in the politics of the region and nation, particularly the fraying of the New Deal coalition that had kept white Southerners in a partnership with liberals and progressives elsewhere in the country.

“This is a guy who is showing up as the train has sort of already left the station,” Schaller said, “which is not his fault in a sense.”

Though he had a small-town South Georgia upbringing, Carter stood out in his early years as an against-the-grain racial progressive. When, after a career as a naval officer, he returned to his hometown, Plains, to run the family peanut business, he refused to join the local chapter of the racist White Citizens Council. His business was briefly boycotted as a result.

In his 1970 run for governor, however, he made a calculated play for the votes of less enlightened Georgia whites. “In 1970, Carter’s campaign was pretty tawdry,” said Randall Ballmer, a Carter biographer. That year, Carter adopted the campaign slogan of segregationist Alabama politician George Wallace; praised Lester Maddox, the rabid segregationist he succeeded as governor; and courted Roy V. Harris, a former president of the Citizens’ Councils of America.

Those actions were, apparently, tawdry means to an end. “You won’t like my campaign,” Carter had warned Vernon Jordan, the president of the National Urban League, “but you will like my administration.”

After a governorship that mixed zero-based budgeting with aggressive hiring and appointments of Black Georgians to government posts, Carter would go on to edge out Gerald Ford, the Republican incumbent, in the 1976 presidential election, promising a fresh start for a country wearied by the debacle of Watergate. He dominated the South in the Electoral College that year, in part by presenting himself as an unapologetic born-again Christian.

Some elements of Carter’s public persona, from his embrace of evangelical Christianity to his proud emphasis of his rural roots, could be found in many Southern politicians who preceded and followed him. But in other ways, he was sui generis. He could be more prickly than backslapping. He read Reinhold Niebuhr and launched an infamous jeremiad against American consumerism and spiritual malaise. He quoted Bob Dylan, often, and purposefully allied himself with long-haired Southern rock juggernauts of the 1970s, including the Allman Brothers.

His overt religiosity won him enthusiastic support among millions of white worshippers allied with the Southern Baptist Convention, the powerful protestant denomination based in Nashville. In the midst of the 1976 campaign, one of the denomination’s leaders, Bailey Smith, told delegates to the Southern Baptists’ annual gathering that America “needs a born-again man in the White House,” as Balmer recounted in his biography of Carter.

Smith even noted that Carter’s initials, JC, were “the same as our Lord’s.”

The alliance would not endure. Carter hewed to the traditional Baptist stance of respecting the division between church and state, at a time when America’s evangelical and fundamentalist movements were beginning to fuse with the modern Republican Party. As a state senator, he had voted against a law that mandated worshipping God. Though opposed to abortion, Carter, as president, refused to move to outlaw the practice, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling on the matter.

These and other positions he took, on issues from feminism to foreign policy, alienated millions of voters from what would soon come to be known as the religious right, led by increasingly influential televangelists such as Jerry Falwell of Virginia. In August 1980, Smith, who was elected president of the Southern Baptists that year, told Carter that he hoped the president would abandon “secular humanism.”

At the same time, Republicans were casting a net for white Southerners who were uneasy with integration. As he campaigned for president, Reagan visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, near where three civil rights workers had been slain 16 years earlier, and gave a speech extolling states’ rights.

It was just one expression of the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” to peel white voters away from the Democratic Party, using race as the tool. Reagan ended up sweeping the South that year in the Electoral College, with the exception of Georgia.

Back in his home state after his presidency, Carter, when not building houses for the poor or monitoring elections in fledgling democracies, continued to exert influence on Democratic leaders. Roy Barnes, a Democrat who served as governor from 1999 to 2003, said he followed closely in Carter’s footsteps by choosing diverse appointees to state positions that “looked like the face of Georgia.” He said he also consulted with Carter as he led a fight to change the state flag, which at the time contained the battle-flag emblem of the Confederacy.

“I felt great kinship with him,” Barnes said in an interview, adding that Carter provided a model for a generation of white Southern Democrats.

“We don’t think of ourselves as liberals, we think of ourselves as moderates, fiscally,” he said. “It’s just that we have different views on race, and what we’re required to do by our moral convictions. Jimmy Carter gave us that.”

But fiscal moderation has not been the only way to recreate a workable version of the Carter model. An abiding Christian faith, in the most religious region in the nation, can also help in the construction of a winning coalition.

That was the case for Warnock, the Atlanta pastor who won a special election in 2021 to became Georgia’s first Black senator, and then won reelection in 2022 to a full term, all with the full-throated endorsement of Carter.