President Carter's Southern Strategy: The Importance of Wallace Voters in 1976 and 1980

This panel is interested in examining george wallace's place in American political history fifty years after his failed run for president in 1968. Much has been written about Wallace and his connection to American conservatism. My focus, however, is to explore Wallace's relationship with Democratic president Jimmy Carter. From Carter's election as governor of Georgia in 1970 to his failed bid for reelection in 1980, the two men were connected. Carter drew on Wallace for campaign themes and endorsements that would solidify Carter's support with Wallace voters across the South—an important demographic for any Democrat seeking the presidency in the 1970s.

Indeed, Carter owed his election in 1976 to his ability to recreate the New Deal coalition—which included winning all the southern states with the exception of Virginia. Carter successfully formed a winning coalition in those states by appealing to two seemingly disparate voting groups: African Americans and rural whites who had voted for George Wallace. Carter was able to use symbols of the segregationist South, such as Senator James Eastland, Senator John Stennis, Governor George Wallace, and others as surrogates to appeal to white working-class voters while not alienating black voters enough to make them vote for President Gerald Ford.¹

The 1976 presidential contest proved to be an extremely close election.² At two in the morning, it was still unclear who would be the next president of the United States. The results from Illinois, Ohio, California, and Mississippi were still out and the Carter campaign nervously waited for one of the four to put its candidate over the top. Phil Wise, at Carter headquarters, picked up the phone and begged Danny Cupit, Carter's Mississippi campaign co-director, to give him the results of the state. As Cupit explained that several precincts were still reporting their results, a frustrated Wise exclaimed, "This is getting down to where Mississippi is going to make the determination whether this guy gets elected president of the United States, so could you give me a little bit more feedback!"³

Campaign aides and supporters on the ground in Mississippi were just as frustrated with the slow returns. Mark Hazard, a staffer on loan from Senator Jim Eastland's office, told one supporter from Alcorn County that the results were too close to call. The supporter responded bluntly, "Hell, just tell 'em Mississippi went for Carter, and we'll find the votes up here in the morning!"⁴ Thirty minutes later, around 2:30 a.m., NBC assigned Mississippi to Carter. The candidate was on the phone with Mississippi Governor Cliff Finch when the media called the state. Carter exclaimed, "Cliff, Mississippi just put me over the top. I love every one of you!"⁵

The Carter campaign, and later administration, recognized that its political victory was the result of reconstructing the New Deal coalition. Specifically, in Mississippi, the campaign had relied on "a coalition of rural poor whites in northeast Mississippi and Blacks" in contrast to Ford's reliance on "urban and upwardly mobile whites in southern Mississippi and Jackson."⁶ Throughout the campaign, Carter walked a tightrope of appealing to former Wallace voters in the northeast part of the state without alienating African Americans.⁷

Indeed, the Carter campaign depended largely on former segregationists as surrogates across the South and particularly in Mississippi. In appealing to white rural voters, Carter "brought to task two heavyweights Ford couldn't match: Jim Eastland and George Wallace."⁸ The South was critical to Carter's hopes for the White House, and he kicked off the general election campaign in Mississippi with Senators Eastland and Stennis by his side.⁹ Both men had signed the 1956 "Southern Manifesto" to counter Brown v. Education. Despite their differences with Carter on the issue of civil rights, Carter had no problem campaigning with them and using them as surrogates.

The campaign faced scrutiny, however, as the press questioned Carter's tactics. The morning after the event in Mississippi, the New York Times wrote that "Jimmy Carter...