How Washington outsider Jimmy Carter wooed voters tired of Vietnam and Watergate

Jimmy Carter’s ascent to the White House was something few people could have predicted when he was governor of the US state of Georgia.

It was no different for Jimmy Carter in the early 1970s.

It took meeting several presidential candidates and then encouragement from an esteemed elder statesman before the young governor, who had never met a president himself, saw himself as something bigger.

He announced his White House bid on December 12 1974, amid fallout from the Vietnam War and the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Then he leveraged his unknown, and politically untainted, status to become the 39th president.

That whirlwind path has been a model, explicit and otherwise, for would-be contenders ever since.

“Jimmy Carter’s example absolutely created a 50-year window of people saying, ‘Why not me?’” said Steve Schale, who worked on President Barack Obama’s campaigns and is a long-time supporter of President Joe Biden.

Mr Carter’s journey to high office began in Plains, Georgia where he received end-of-life care decades after serving as president.

David Axelrod, who helped to engineer Mr Obama’s four-year ascent from state senator to the Oval Office, said Mr Carter’s model is about more than how his grassroots strategy turned the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary into his springboard.

“There was a moral stain on the country, and this was a guy of deep faith,” Mr Axelrod said.

“He seemed like a fresh start, and I think he understood that he could offer something different that might be able to meet the moment.”

Donna Brazile, who managed Democrat Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, got her start on Mr Carter’s two national campaigns.

“In 1976, it was just Jimmy Carter’s time,” she said.

Of course, the seeds of his presidential run sprouted even before Mr Nixon won a second term and certainly before his resignation in August 1974.

In Mr Carter’s telling, he did not run for governor in 1966, he lost, or in 1970 thinking about Washington.

Even when he announced his presidential bid, neither he nor those closest to him were completely confident.

“President of what?” his mother, Lillian, replied when he told her his plans.

But soon after he became governor in 1971, Mr Carter’s team envisioned him as a national player.

They were encouraged in part by the May 31 Time magazine cover depicting Mr Carter alongside the headline “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune”.

Inside, a flattering profile framed Mr Carter as a model “New South” governor.

In October 1971, Carter ally Dr Peter Bourne, an Atlanta physician who would become US drug tsar, sent his politician friend an unsolicited memo outlining how he could be elected president.

On October 17, a wider circle of advisers sat with Mr Carter at the Governor’s Mansion to discuss it.

Mr Carter, then 47, wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, according to biographer Jonathan Alter.

The team, including Mr Carter’s wife Rosalynn, who died aged 96 in November 2023, began considering the idea seriously.

“We never used the word ‘president’,” Mr Carter recalled upon his 90th birthday, “but just referred to national office”.

Mr Carter invited high-profile Democrats and Washington players who were running or considering running in 1972, to one-on-one meetings at the mansion.

He jumped at the chance to lead the Democratic National Committee’s national campaign that year.

The position allowed him to travel the country helping candidates up and down the ballot.

Along the way, he was among the Southern governors who angled to be George McGovern’s running mate.

Mr Alter said Mr Carter was never seriously considered.

Still, Mr Carter got to know, among others, former vice president Hubert Humphrey and senators Henry Jackson of Washington, Eugene McCarthy of Maine and Mr McGovern of South Dakota, the eventual nominee who lost a landslide to Mr Nixon.

Mr Carter later explained he had previously defined the nation’s highest office by its occupants immortalised by monuments.

“For the first time,” Mr Carter told The New York Times, “I started comparing my own experiences and knowledge of government with the candidates, not against ‘the presidency’ and not against Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It made it a whole lot easier”.

Adviser Hamilton Jordan crafted a detailed campaign plan calling for matching Mr Carter’s outsider, good-government credentials to voters’ general disillusionment, even before Watergate.

But the team still spoke and wrote in code, as if the “higher office” were not obvious.

It was reported during his campaign that Mr Carter told family members around Christmas 1972 that he would run in 1976.

Mr Carter later wrote in a memoir that a visit from former secretary of state Dean Rusk in early 1973 affirmed his leanings.

During another private confab in Atlanta, Mr Rusk told Mr Carter plainly: “Governor, I think you should run for president in 1976.”

That, Mr Carter wrote, “removed our remaining doubts.”

Mr Schale said the process is not always so involved.

“These are intensely competitive people already,” he said of governors, senators and others in high office.

“If you’re wired in that capacity, it’s hard to step away from it.”

“Jimmy Carter showed us that you can go from a no-name to president in the span of 18 or 24 months,” said Jared Leopold, a top aide in Washington governor Jay Inslee’s unsuccessful bid for Democrats’ 2020 nomination.

“For people deciding whether to get in, it’s a real inspiration,” Mr Leopold continued, “and that’s a real success of American democracy”.