How Jimmy Carter's presidency still resonates in the 2024 election

WASHINGTON – Former President Jimmy Carter is now the first occupant of the White House to celebrate his 100th birthday – and one of the very few leaders with a political legacy that has lasted nearly half a century.

When Carter ascended to the presidency in the post-Vietnam, Watergate year of 1976, he changed the way presidential candidates were nominated and elected, instituting a system focused on primaries, caucuses and debates. He was the first modern anti-Washington “outsider” to actually win the presidency, setting a model that most of his seven successors followed to some extent.

Although he only served a four-year term, Carter had to grapple with issues that continued to challenge many of his successors, including inflation, climate, energy production, health care and conflicts in the Middle East – particularly with Iran.

While lawmakers of all ideological stripes have praised Carter’s post-presidency work, from building houses to overseeing elections abroad, the country’s 39th president has in some ways provided a model for what not to do in office. At the top of the list: fight your own party’s leaders, attract high-profile primary opposition, and lose re-election in a landslide.

Carter lost the presidency in 1980 to Republican Ronald Reagan, an election that secured power for a long-standing conservative movement that remains a major force in the current race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

“He had a far more consequential presidency than many people realize,” said historian Kai Bird, a Carter biographer. “Look at the big problems we’re still dealing with today.”

An “outsider”: Carter in the election campaign

Carter’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1976 established primaries as the institution they remain today, a means of attracting convention delegates and securing nominations.

There was once a time when it would have been impossible for a little-known person like Carter to rise to the presidential nomination. There were few primaries and caucuses, and party leaders (and “bosses”) controlled the nomination process at party conventions.

That was turned on its head when the Democratic Party made rule changes after the turbulent 1968 election. George McGovern took advantage of these changes to surprisingly win the nomination in 1972, but lost the general election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.

Jimmy Carter took full advantage of the improved primary system in 1976 and made it to the end.

The former one-term governor of Georgia made a name for himself by running in every primary and caucus, the importance of which skyrocketed as party bosses were ousted from power. Carter’s first victory in the Iowa caucuses gave the event the significance it still enjoys today.

In the fall race against President Gerald Ford – who had replaced Nixon, who had resigned because of Watergate – Carter benefited from another new development that became an institution: general election debates.

In 1960, presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Nixon debated four times. But in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 election campaigns, the candidates avoided personal meetings. It took Carter and Ford to institutionalize general election debates, culminating in the pivotal Trump-Biden-Harris-Trump contests this year.

“The 1976 debates were really important,” said historian Julian Zelizer, author of a biography of Carter. Overall, Carter “really understood how modern campaigns work,” Zelizer said. “He understood how politics had changed.”

But it wasn’t just the literal process of campaigning that Carter helped bring about change. He also shaped the way White House candidates engage with voters.

The former Georgia state senator created a role model of sorts for future candidates by running as an “outsider” who would remove a corrupt government. He pursued this strategy at a particularly difficult time in the country’s history, when Vietnam and Watergate had divided society and politics and opened the door for new faces like Carter.

Most of Carter’s successors ran as “outsiders” who were not part of the so-called “Washington establishment,” including governors or former governors such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; first-time senator Barack Obama and maverick businessman Donald Trump.

How Carter Influenced the Presidency

After his inauguration on January 20, 1977, Carter carried his anti-Washington stance into the Oval Office. His antipathy for the establishment extended even to his own Democratic Party. He battled with congressional leaders like newly installed House Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., and powerful Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on issues such as reorganizing the government (to give more power to the president) and health care and deregulation.

In his biography of Carter, Zelizer wrote that the maverick president “simply didn’t like legislative politics.”

“His discomfort caused even more tension than would have been the case under other circumstances,” Zelizer wrote. “Congressional leadership did not trust Carter any more than he trusted them and did not feel that they shared political interests.”

Carter also noted a number of serious problems that remain. Tensions with oil producing countries led to shortages and higher gas prices. The combination of slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising inflation gave rise to a new economic term: stagflation.

The former president set several foreign policy milestones, including the Panama Canal Treaty and an emphasis on global human rights. Carter also brokered the Camp David Accords, the landmark treaty between Israel and Egypt that remains a model for peace negotiations in the Middle East.

But the Carter years also saw the first confrontation between the USA and the Iranian government under Ayatollah Khomeini. In late 1979, Iranian students occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and arrested more than 50 Americans. The hostage crisis in Iran lasted 444 days.

Future presidents would also argue with Iran. In the current presidential campaign, intelligence officials have said that Iranians are engaging in interference in the U.S. election, including hacking into Trump’s campaign computers. And as the war between Israel and Hamas rages on and the conflict between Israel and Iran grows, the global challenges of Carter’s time in office continue to resonate today.

But during his presidency, Carter’s disputes were exacerbated by friction with his fellow Democrats.

His plans to deregulate airlines and other industries brought him into conflict with labor unions, a major source of Democratic support. Carter’s disagreement with Kennedy over the handling of health care led to a development that recent presidents have avoided – a major challenge in a reelection year.

Carter defeated Kennedy for the nomination in 1980, but the tough competition extended to the convention and weakened the incumbent before his landslide defeat by Reagan.

(A little presidential trivia: Who was the first politician to warn Carter in 1978 that Kennedy might run against him in 1980? A 35-year-old senator from Delaware named Joe Biden.)

In assessing Carter’s career, Bird titled his biography “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”

“As a politician,” Bird wrote, “he was most of the time a non-politician, uninterested in the persuasions and profiteering of Washington. This made him both an outsider and an outlier – ‘a person or thing that is apart from or detached from the mainstream body or system.’”

Carter’s work after his presidency

Carter remained in the public eye even after the defeat. From building homes with Habitat for Humanity to observing elections abroad to fighting global diseases, Carter has practically created the new job of “former president.”

He is also known to have spoken out against some of the actions of his predecessors, making him one of the less popular members of the “President’s Club” over the years.

Carter’s criticism was bipartisan. He questioned Clinton’s handling of nuclear negotiations with North Korea and criticized President George W. Bush for the Iraq War and other aspects of the fight against terrorism.

Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, said Carter showed that “sometimes it’s worth doing the right thing, even if it incurs political costs.” Still, Zelizer added, “If you don’t keep your political coalition together, you could end up with a successor who could undo everything you’ve done.”

Carter and the 2024 campaign

Carter’s name has come up often in 2024, as a punchline for Trump and a source of inspiration for Democrats like Harris and President Joe Biden.

Trump often claims at rallies that Carter should be in good spirits because Biden replaced him as what he calls the worst president in history.

“Jimmy Carter is the luckiest man because the Carter administration was absolutely brilliant by comparison,” Trump said in North Carolina last week.

Biden hasn’t publicly responded to the joke Trump used in months. But Carter, meanwhile, found his own way to retaliate for all the insults directed at Trump by announcing that he wanted to get past 100 for one reason: to elect Harris president.

“‘I’m just trying to vote for Kamala Harris,'” son Chip Carter quoted his father as saying, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Biden, who was the first sitting senator to support the former Georgia governor in his long-term presidential bid five decades ago, said Carter had asked him to deliver a eulogy in due course.

In a statement to CBS News on Sunday, Biden said of Carter: “Your hopeful vision for our country, your commitment to a better world, and your unwavering belief in the power of human kindness continue to be a guiding light for us all. You.” You know, you are one of the most influential statesmen in our history.

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How Jimmy Carter’s presidency still resonates in the 2024 election

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Carter’s work after his presidency

Carter and the 2024 campaign

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