Former president Jimmy Carter is shown in January 1977, speaking after taking the oath of office. | AP Photo politics Democrats find a foil for Trump in Jimmy Carter For decades, Democrats wanted nothing to do with the one-term president associated with do-gooder weakness. With Trump in office, that's starting to change.

The post-presidential rehabilitation of Jimmy Carter’s image is reaching a new peak.

After a decadeslong climb from the gutter of public opinion, the truth-telling one-term ex-president is suddenly a sought-after commodity in the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign — a symbol candidates can wrap themselves around as everything Donald Trump is not.


Since January, at least two Democratic presidential contenders have reached out to him, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who met with him separately in his hometown of Plains, Ga.

For Democrats who once shunned Carter, his reputation’s revival is not only the product of time and his own substantial post-presidential work. It's also a function of Trump — a study in contrast to the earnest peanut farmer from Georgia — and a field full of Democrats yearning to replicate his come-from-nowhere victory in the presidential election in 1976.

In January, after Booker and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) met with Carter in Georgia, Booker posted a video on Instagram of Carter telling him, “I hope you run for president,” to which Booker responded, “You encouraging me means more to me than you could imagine.”

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Then came Klobuchar, who publicized her meeting with Carter last month. Following a lunch with Carter, an adviser to Klobuchar told POLITICO that Carter is “genuine and authentic, and that’s really the lane that we think makes Amy unique.” The adviser said Carter and Klobuchar share “an ability to culturally connect with people of various backgrounds, not being viewed as an East Coast elite.”

Immediately following his loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Carter was viewed by many Democrats as a disaster. His defeat not only elevated Reagan. It presaged 12 years of Republican control of the White House, while subjecting Democrats to a generation of criticism — unfairly, Carter’s supporters said — that the party was feckless, overly moralistic and weak on foreign policy.

When Carter left the presidency in 1981, he had posted an average Gallup approval rating of 45.5 percent, better than only Harry Truman among post-World War II presidents. But over nearly four decades, Carter began to repair his legacy.

Following his loss, he and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Georgia-based Carter Center, with its focus on humanitarian causes around the world. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

By 2015, a Quinnipiac University poll found registered voters viewed Carter as having done the best work since leaving office among presidents from Carter through George W. Bush. And the success of Carter’s post-presidency — combined with the polarizing presidencies of Barack Obama and Trump — appears to have softened criticism of Carter’s single term. When Gallup asked voters last year to rate Carter’s handling of his presidency, 55 percent approved.

“He took up causes and issues on things that really motivated him in the White House: human rights, and fair elections, tried to improve the lot of the world through public health,” said Les Francis, a deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration. “For those of us who worked for him, the light we see him in now is no different than the light we saw him in while in office. But for a lot of people, it’s new … I think people are looking at his presidency through the prism of his ex-presidency, and they thereby have a much more complete and nuanced view.”

For Democrats preparing for the 2020 election, the party’s most recent president, Obama, remains a far more popular draw than Carter. And unlike Carter, Obama will be expected to rally support and raise money for the eventual nominee. But Carter, at 94, is less closely associated than Obama with the current era of partisanship and dysfunction in Washington that many voters revile.

“Carter almost takes us out of the entire realm of what our politics has become,” said Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Carter and Howard Dean. “He’s the anti-Trump … I mean, we have almost the polar opposite as president, somebody who is so an affront to everything that’s good and kind and decent.”

Maslin said, “I have felt for some time that a candidate who is not just good on the issues but can marshal a moral clarity about what our politics ought to be, in contrast to what it has become, that person … that could be the currency of 2020.”

In fact, Carter has become a constant point of reference early in the campaign for Democrats polling outside of the top tier. John Delaney, the little-known former Maryland congressman who by August 2018 had already campaigned in all 99 counties in Iowa, has likened his focus on the first-in-the-nation caucus state to Carter’s.

And after her pilgrimage to see Carter this year, Klobuchar wrote on social media, “Wonderful lunch with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter today at their home in Plains. Tomato soup and pimento cheese sandwiches! Got some good advice and helpful to hear about their grassroots presidential campaign (when no one thought they could win but they did)!”

It's not just that the former Georgia governor managed to win the presidency that appeals to Democrats, but also the message he employed, one some Democrats believe can be replicated against Trump. In his 1976 campaign against President Gerald Ford, Carter cast himself as the measured antidote to Watergate-era politics, promising voters that he would never lie to them and vowing to “clean up the mess in Washington.”

In a general election against Trump in 2020, said Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser and a former ambassador, “I really believe that there’s an opening … for someone running a campaign like Carter did in ‘76, based on honesty, trust, respect for the presidency, respect for institutions like the FBI, the Justice Department and even the press.”

Given Trump’s advantages of incumbency, Eizenstat said, “If we’re not united, and we don’t take the energy of the left and the pragmatism of the middle, which is what Carter was able to do in ‘76, then we could lose another election.”

In some ways, Carter has made it easier for the Democratic Party’s base to embrace him, and vice versa. Carter has said he voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary. Meanwhile, Carter’s “pacifist, leftist positions on some issues have in a way almost become mainstream in the party,” said Garry South, a Democratic strategist who worked on Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign.

Carter’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment. But the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta has reported steadily increasing attendance figures from 2015 through mid-2018. And in his hometown of Plains, the front-counter staff at the Buffalo Café said this week that they’ve also seen an uptick in business — and interest in the former president.

“We get a lot of people here for Jimmy Carter,” said Jimmy Odom, who works at the downtown restaurant. “Last year wasn’t as big.”

“I mean, look, as with almost anyone, the passage of time creates a level of comfort, familiarity, forgiveness or compassion,” said John Watson, chairman of the Republican Party in Georgia.

Even if Carter “struggled” while in office, Watson said, he is still “a man with character and has been incredibly earnest in finding good causes as an ex-president.”