page_title: Jimmy Carter
section_title: Democratic primary
hierarchical_section_title: Jimmy Carter / 1976 presidential campaign / Democratic primary
caption_attribution_description: English: President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter meet at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia to debate domestic policy during the first of the three Ford-Carter Debates.Français&#160;: Gerald Ford et Jimmy Carter à Philadelphie lors du premier des trois débats politiques entre les deux hommes durant la campagne présidentielle(23-09-1976).
context_page_description: James Earl Carter Jr. is an American politician, philanthropist, and former farmer who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a Georgia State Senator from 1963 to 1967 and as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975. Since leaving the presidency, Carter has remained engaged in political and social projects as a private citizen; in 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in co-founding the Carter Center.
  Raised in Plains, Georgia, Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree and joined the United States Navy, where he served on submarines. After the death of his father in 1953, Carter left his naval career and returned home to Georgia to take up the reins of his family's peanut-growing business. Carter inherited comparatively little due to his father's forgiveness of debts and the division of the estate among the children. Nevertheless, his ambition to expand and grow the Carters' peanut business was fulfilled.
context_section_description: On December 12, 1974, Carter announced his candidacy for President of the United States at National Press Club in Washington, D.C. His speech contained themes of domestic inequality, optimism, and change.
  When Carter entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries, he was considered to have little chance against nationally better-known politicians; his name recognition was two percent. As late as January 26, 1976, Carter was the first choice of only four percent of Democratic voters, according to a Gallup poll. Yet "by mid-March 1976 Carter was not only far ahead of the active contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, he also led President Ford by a few percentage points," according to Shoup. As the Watergate scandal of President Nixon was still fresh in the voters' minds, Carter's position as an outsider, distant from Washington, D.C., became an asset. He promoted government reorganization. Carter published Why Not the Best? in June 1976 to help introduce himself to the American public.
  Carter became the front-runner early on by winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. He used a two-prong strategy: in the South, which most had tacitly conceded to Alabama's George Wallace, Carter ran as a moderate favorite son. When Wallace proved to be a spent force, Carter swept the region. In the North, Carter appealed largely to conservative Christian and rural voters; he had little chance of winning a majority in most states. He won several Northern states by building the largest single bloc. Carter's strategy involved reaching a region before another candidate could extend influence there. He had traveled over 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometres), visited 37 states, and delivered over 200 speeches before any other candidate entered the race. Initially dismissed as a regional candidate, Carter proved to be the Democrat with the most effective national strategy, and he clinched the nomination.
  The national news media discovered and promoted Carter, as Lawrence Shoup noted in his 1980 book The Carter Presidency and Beyond:
  What Carter had that his opponents did not was the acceptance and support of elite sectors of the mass communications media. It was their favorable coverage of Carter and his campaign that gave him an edge, propelling him rocket-like to the top of the opinion polls. This helped Carter win key primary election victories, enabling him to rise from an obscure public figure to President-elect in the short space of 9 months.
  During his presidential campaign in April 1976, Carter responded to an interviewer and said, "I have nothing against a community that is ... trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods." His remark was intended as supportive of open-housing laws, but specifying opposition to government efforts to "inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration."
  Carter's stated positions during his campaign include public financing of congressional campaigns, his support for the creation of a federal consumer protection agency, creating a separate department for education, signing a peace treaty with the Soviet Union against the usage of nuclear weapon, reducing the defense budget, a tax proposal implementing "a substantial increase toward those who have the higher incomes" alongside a levy reduction on taxpayers with lower and middle incomes, making multiple amendments to the Social Security Act, and having a balanced budget by the end of his tenure.
caption: Carter and President Gerald Ford debating at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia
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