Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

It was May 1976, and Jimmy Carter, a former one-term governor of Georgia, was barreling his way in the most unlikely fashion toward the Democratic nomination. That’s when a loose coalition of prominent Democrats at the state and federal level decided to try to stop him. Coalescing under the “Anybody But Carter” umbrella, his detractors launched a last-ditch effort to deny the former governor enough delegates to win on the first ballot at the convention that summer.

It didn’t work.


That year, long before the #NeverTrump movement and long before Ted Cruz and John Kasich teamed up to thwart this year’s GOP front-runner, Anybody But Carter failed to derail an insurgent who, alone, seemed to understand the intensity of popular discontent with politics and politicians. It’s a good lesson this year, as Republican elites desperately try to prevent Donald Trump from securing their party’s nomination.

Like Trump, Carter pursued the presidency as an anti-establishment maverick and courted disaffected voters with a jeremiad that decried America’s fall from power and grace.

A small-town man of pious disposition, Carter was sharply out of place among a slate of better-known candidates who more naturally appealed to the party’s liberal imagination. His own domestic policy adviser acknowledged that he was “clearly the most conservative of the Democratic candidates,” “the only one talking about balanced budgets and less bureaucracy and less red tape.” Party regulars despised his personality, too. At once self-righteous and slippery, he was, according to Bob Shrum, the young speechwriter who quit his campaign in mid-cycle, “a dangerous man”—“it would be bad for this person to be president.”

But, after the Vietnam War, Watergate and a string of congressional scandals, many Democratic primary voters loved Carter’s anti-establishment credentials and his skepticism of government as a salve for all problems economic and social. “It is not merely that Jimmy Carter is an ‘outsider,’” observed New York Times reporter James Reston late that month, “or that the party and labor elders don’t know what he’d do as president. [The] Democrats don’t know quite what to do with him because nobody but the people seem to be for him.”

And in the end, that momentum proved more potent than a last-ditch effort organized by the party’s most powerful players. It was simply too late to stop a candidate who, by then, could fairly claim a popular mandate among his party’s primary voters.

Today, the same is probably true.

***

When Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia told his mother that he planned to run for president, she famously asked him, “President of what?” Carter was a onetime peanut farmer and state senator whose term as governor was due to expire in 1975. Nothing about his ambition seemed plausible to most early observers.

Carter’s candidacy was the brainchild of his young aide, Hamilton Jordan, who dreamed the idea up in Miami during the 1972 Democratic National Convention. “The [1972] general election hadn’t even taken place,” he later acknowledged. “We all knew it looked kind of preposterous, but we were serious about it. It was hard to say it. I can remember I didn’t make a very good presentation. It was hard really to talk about it. It was almost embarrassing.” In his campaign strategy document, Jordan posited that “the strongest feeling in this country today is the general distrust of government and politicians at all levels.”

As an outsider who was neither a career politician nor a member of the Washington establishment, Carter could tap into a deep reserve of popular discontent with politics. Indeed, if one political theme can be said to lend the 1970s coherence as a decade, it was the collapse of political leadership. From Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, to Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, the men who had led the United States in Depression, war and peace cut bold, decisive figures on the national stage. But that state of affairs changed after 1963.

Lyndon Johnson, who was a commanding president on the domestic front, opened up a wide “credibility gap” over his administration’s policies in Vietnam. Richard Nixon’s presidency ended in disgrace Gerald Ford’s brief tenure was marked by economic instability at home and final defeat in Southeast Asia.

The legislative branch fared little better, as Congress found itself mired in scandal after scandal throughout the decade. Among other imbroglios, the 1970s witnessed the personal destruction of Wilbur Mills, the all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who stumbled onto the stage at a Boston strip club and joined Annabel Battistella—aka Fanne Foxe—for several of her dance numbers. Mills might have survived the embarrassment had he not been involved in an earlier incident in Washington, when he and Foxe were stopped while driving by a police officer for failing to turn on the car lights. Mills was clearly intoxicated and, for good measure, Foxe fled the car and jumped into the Tidal Basin. Only slightly more scandalous was Mills’ colleague, Wayne Hays, chairman of the House Administration Committee, who kept his longtime mistress on the government payroll as a secretary, though when the arrangement finally attracted the scrutiny of legal authorities, she admitted, “I can’t type. I can’t file. I can’t even answer the phone.”

Whereas 78 percent of poll respondents in 1964 thought that the government could be “trusted to do the right thing” either “always” or “most of the time,” by 1976, only 33 percent of Americans still held expressed that level of trust. In 1964, surveys showed some 47 percent of voters believed that “people in government waste a lot of money that we pay in taxes”; a decade later, more than 70 percent of Americans felt that way. Similar trends were in evidence when pollsters asked people whether “the best government is the government that governs least,” or whether the federal government created more problems than it solved.

Looking ahead to the 1976 primary election cycle, Carter’s advisers saw an opening to appeal to voters who were disgusted with politics as usual. With almost three-quarters of convention delegates scheduled to be chosen by direct primary or caucus, in a crowded field, the Georgia governor could score pluralities in Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida and then build enough momentum to sweep big-state primaries later in the spring.

Jordan’s projections proved right. Running against Rep. Morris Udall, Sen. Birch Bayh and former vice presidential nominee Sargent Shriver, among others, on the left, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the center, and George Wallace on the right, Carter won Iowa with 27.6 percent and prevailed in Florida and New Hampshire.

Running as a reform candidate, Carter spoke vaguely of restoring the “trust of the people in government” and pointedly refused to be pinned down on a specific platform. Historian C. Vann Woodward of Yale University wrote of “Carter’s remarkable propensity for fusing contradictions and reconciling opposites,” thus creating “an unusual assortment of unified ambiguities and ambiguous unities.” There was substance to this criticism. Though he told leaders of the fledgling pro-life movement that he was “personally opposed to abortion,” he also opposed a constitutional amendment reversing Roe v. Wade. Though he raised the ire of liberals when he told an audience in Pennsylvania that he saw nothing wrong with white city dwellers “trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods,” and though he vowed he was “not in favor of mandatory busing,” he also said that he did “not favor a constitutional amendment to prohibit busing.” His position on school desegregation was sufficiently vague that when Scoop Jackson ran a newspaper ad in Boston that read, “I AM AGAINST BUSING,” Carter, who also opposed busing, scolded his rival. Busing was an “emotional issue,” he reminded Jackson, and his ad had “racial or racist overtones.” It was little wonder that Mo Udall threw up his arms in frustration and demanded to know, “Who is Jimmy Carter?”

But it was Carter’s personality that truly rankled his opponents. A slick and cynical campaigner whose smile, Shrum observed, went “on and off like a lightbulb,” Carter played it loose with the details and courted white backlash voters, yet derided other politicians as morally unfit or, in the case of Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president who contemplated a late entrance into the race, “too old” and “a loser.” (One can only wonder how Carter would have managed his Twitter account, had such a thing existed.) Even some of his aides later derided his “endless, ill-concealed, eye-popping sanctimony.” He was “cold and hard,” remarked journalist Elizabeth Drew. “No smiles, no warmth.”

Carter’s pollster, Pat Caddell, said that “skill and luck” were the key ingredients of a winning campaign, and Carter benefited from both. Prominent Democrats like Edward Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale declined to enter the race, while those who did enter it stumbled badly. With Carter fusing respectability to an anti-establishment message, George Wallace — the candidate of anti-government rage in 1968 and 1972 — found himself boxed out. On the left, Mo Udall ran what many pols regarded as a surprisingly poor, uncoordinated campaign. In the center, Scoop Jackson struggled to find his footing. He was too liberal on economic and social issues for conservative Democrats, and too hawkish for liberals. From January through May, Carter placed first in 16 primaries and caucuses, leaving his opponents to divide up another eight between them. In several of those contests, Carter placed second and accumulated delegates. It was effectively Carter's race to lose, barring the last-minute entry of a viable alternative.

Realizing that the current field was inadequate to the task, in May, the so-called Anybody But Carter forces that had been brewing within the party coalesced behind two late entrants—Senator Frank Church, a liberal stalwart from Idaho, and Jerry Brown, California’s young, “enigmatic but ambitious” governor, as the New York Times’ Tom Wicker sized him up that year. With so many of the late primaries concentrated out West, popular thinking held that a fresh face—or two—from that region might be able to accomplish what the earlier contestants had not.

At first, the strategy seemed to have legs. Carter lost to Brown in the delegate-rich Maryland primary on May 18, and then to Church in a string of western primaries on June 1. Looking ahead to the “Big Casino” primaries scheduled for June 8, with more than 500 delegates from New Jersey, California and Ohio at stake, it seemed possible that Brown and Church could deny Carter a first-ballot win. Then, it was anyone’s guess what might happen. The convention could draft Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, or perhaps even Humphrey. (Of course, Brown and Church each imagined himself in that role.)

It didn’t work out that way. For one, Frank Church stumbled on an almost unbelievable run of bad luck. Campaigning in Los Angeles, he contracted a virus and was bedridden for days. Then, a luggage truck slammed into his chartered campaign plane on the tarmac, incapacitating it and causing ill-timed travel days. Then, as he campaigned in Ohio, still appearing wan and washed-out from his illness, word came that a major dam had burst in Idaho, obliging him to return to his home state.

More fundamentally, the math didn’t add up for Anybody But Carter. With the former Georgia governor favored to win New Jersey and Ohio, even a home-state blowout by Jerry Brown would not suffice to derail the Carter train. As Wicker observed, even in defeat, Carter would likely take upwards of 43 delegates in California, courtesy of the state’s proportional award system. That would net him between 1200 and 1300 delegates—still shy of the 1,505 needed for the nomination, but closer by a mile than any other candidate. Ultimately, Anybody But Carter fell short, and unpledged delegates—forerunners to today’s controversial Superdelegates—fell in line with the popular choice.

Could the Anybody But Carter camp have forced the convention on to a second ballot? Perhaps, Wicker conceded, if they managed to persuade unpledged delegates to hold their powder dry on the first roll call. But the end result would be a disaster for the Democratic Party, which would surely lose Carter’s supporters in the fall. The front-runner had “two powerful arguments going for his nomination,” he wrote on the eve of the Big Casino primaries. “He has fought and won more primary battles than anyone in either party, and is thus the nearest thing the Democrats have to a popular choice; and that he offers the likelihood of returning most of the South … to the Democratic fold.” Above all, a brokered convention resulting in the nomination of someone who had not competed in the primaries would “negate the supposed openness of the nominating process.”

Tom Wicker proved right. In the end analysis, the voters—or more of the voters, in any event—had thrown in their lot with Jimmy Carter, who deftly extended an olive branch to party regulars when he asked Senator Walter Mondale, a widely respected liberal, to be his running mate. The Democratic establishment didn’t warm to Carter; but it accepted him.

Time will tell whether the #NeverTrump movement will succeed where Anybody But Carter failed. But as Tom Wicker once warned, even should it prevail, beware the consequences of disenfranchising millions of voters who won at the ballot box, fair and square.