The Year the GOP Lost to Carter and Embraced the Dark Side

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The Deep South wasn’t always red. For nearly a century, Democrats won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina in almost every presidential election. Republican Barry Goldwater flipped those five states in 1964 by appealing to white voters who opposed Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, and Richard Nixon held onto them with racially coded talk of “states’ rights,” “law and order” in what came to be known as the Southern Strategy.

Jimmy Carter—a peanut farmer, evangelical Christian, and Georgia Democrat—scrambled the Southern Strategy in 1976 by running as a non-ideological antidote to Republicans who were reeling from Richard Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s deeply unpopular pardoning of his Watergate crimes.

It didn’t last, of course. Ronald Reagan won in the Deep South and nearly everywhere else in 1980. Historian Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 is the story of how the Republican Party became more ideologically cohesive, more evangelical Christian, and more driven by white identity politics during the tumultuous Carter years.

Perlstein sat down with The Daily Beast to talk about how Jimmy Carter became a one-term president and conservatives became Republicans.

-more-

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-lost-carter-embraced-dark-090317875.html

[empedocles]

1. The terrible, Nixon gold fiasco, inflation economy knocked Carter out 1980. Any

republicon was going to win in 1980, just as any Dem would win in the bad economy of 2008.

[JHB]

2. Inflation... and the hostage crisis. And other stuff.

Republicans love to crow about how Reagan's debate performance resonated with Americans and marked the definitive swing of opinion toward Reagan, but that leaves out the timing.

That debate, and the shift, occurred in late October. That also happened to be the closing of the window for a speculated "October Surprise", Carter pulling a diplomatic rabbit out of a hat to end the hostage crisis before the election. By that time, it hadn't happened, it was clear it wasn't going to happen, and it looked like the whole humiliating event would just drag on and on and on, and maybe a different approach was needed.

Let's also recall voters who would single-issue vote on support for Israel, and considered the Camp David Accords a raw deal for Israel, as was Carter's attempts at even-handedness about the Palestinians. This block of voters (lets call them "Ed Koch voters" after the man who may be the best known example) despised Carter for these things and were rather gleeful in inflicting him electoral pain.

Also, by 1980, conservatives like Paul Weyrich had convinced evangelicals to blame Carter's administration for loss of tax exemptions for "private religious academies" they had set up to dodge desegregation of public schools (even though it had started under Ford). That's why the turned on the Democrats and went to the GOP, who had practically set up a "welcome" buffet for them.

[empedocles]

3. 14% mortgages rates. [from the Volcker squeeze out inflation drive], was huge methinks.

[JHB]

4. It was. But it wasn't the only thing.

He bled through many cuts. Bled more through some than others, but bled through them all, and in the end they all drained him too much.

[roamer65]

8. Volcker singlehandedly deindustrialized the United States.

His sky high interest rates drove the dollar so high that businesses left the country for Japan and eventually China and Korea.

I’d would love to turn his face into a punching bag.

[demosincebirth]

5. The hostage crisis is what done in Carter. Also the deal that Reagan made, before the election,

not to release the hostages until after the election. Also known as the Iran-Contra fiasco.

[JHB]

6. Iran-Contra was a different thing. Don't conflate it with the October Surprise deal...

...but yes, the hostage crisis was key. It was the only thing that might have shifted enough votes to turn the election in Carter's favor.

[JI7]

7. The Evangelical Shit was cover for white supremacy