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The Truth about Reagan’s 1980 Campaign
Part 3: Jimmy Carter’s Cynical Racial Counter
RTS Admin, Daniel Shuster & Aaron Moatz
July 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes
We’ve explored the true content of Ronald Reagan’s alleged “states’ rights” speech, and how Reagan launched his campaign with a significant focus on attracting the black vote. Now, let’s examine how Carter’s campaign tactics were so demagogic that they were repudiated by both the media and his own administration. The following is Part 3 of our series on the 1980 Campaign and also an excerpt from the upcoming book Dismantled: The Party Switch Myth.
Just before the Democratic National Convention on August 10th, an AP-NBC News poll showed President Carter trailing candidate Ronald Reagan by 25 points; Reagan with 47% to Carter's 22%. Inflation had reached 18% multiple times by the summer of 1980 (for comparison, 2023’s inflation high reached only 5%), and Carter was in danger of falling behind third-party candidate John Anderson.1
Carter also found himself in a precarious position with the black electorate, polling at only 50% before the DNC. This marked a dramatic decline of over 30 points from his 1976 support.2 3
Reagan was making headlines with black voters and holding photo-ops with Jesse Jackson. There were talks of a black delegate walkout during the DNC and even a black protest ticket to challenge Carter's nomination. In a meeting between black Democratic delegates and Jesse Jackson, tensions with Carter were rising. The Philadelphia Daily News reported, “Jackson said Carter’s campaign had ‘insulted black people’ by not involving any of the top black elected officials.” Jackson added, “You don’t like Reagan, so what? You don’t like what you got now.4
Democratic party congressional nominees were afforded the right to name a party delegate to attend the DNC. One of those Democratic nominees in 1980 was Tom Metzger. Metzger, who identified himself as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan said of his delegate choice, who also happened to be a member of the Klan, “The man’s a Democrat, he’s sharp and he’s capable.” Democrats nominating active Klan members in 1980 did not make many headlines for mysterious reasons but even the small attention it gathered certainly wasn’t helping the black vote at the time.5
Put simply, it wasn’t going great for the Carter camp in the summer of 1980. How would he close the gap to Reagan by November?
After the DNC, AP gave a hint of what was to come, “The [DNC] performance left little doubt about President Carter’s campaign strategy: attack Reagan as an extremist...”6
As far as Reagan’s Neshoba speech, other than the single New York Times article that emphasized the “states’ rights” phrase, and after the black-power first week of the Reagan campaign, the issue had largely been forgotten. That is until a familiar friend of Carter reemerged: Andrew Young. Young laid out what became the carbon-copied conventional wisdom and Party Switch scripture of Reagan’s fairgrounds speech.
This wasn’t the first time Young came to the racial rescue of Carter. After the 1976 election, analysts noted the significant impact of the black vote on Carter's narrow victory, stating, “Carter would not be president-elect if it were not for the black vote.” How did Carter manage it?7
Much of that support was engineered by Andrew Young, a one-time top aide to the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who served Carter’s campaign team as an unofficial but highly influential advisor almost from the start. Carter calls Young ‘the best elected official I’ve ever met.’
“When you look at the black vote Carter got, this goes back to Andy Young being with him from the very beginning and giving his campaign credibility among blacks,” said Georgia Lt. Gov Zell Miller.8
Despite Carter's ethnic purity “gaffe” during the 1976 primary, Young remained steadfast in his support for Carter, instantly working to repair relations with black voters. Representative Ralph Metcalfe noted, "[Young] was the first one to come to Carter’s rescue over the ‘ethnic purity’ remark. But he was putting the comments in a different context than the way it appeared in the media, explaining that Carter meant no harm.”9
After the 1976 election, Carter expressed his gratitude for Young’s keen sense of context by appointing him as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. This appointment led some to label Young "the most powerful black in America."10 11 12
After a brief and unusual tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the UN, which ended with Young's resignation, Young stepped back from the Carter orbit until the 1980 election. By then, Young was reportedly in high demand, earning $22,000 in 2024 dollars per appearance. Young’s extensive civil rights credentials had become a nationally marketable and valuable asset by 1980.13
More than a week after Reagan’s Mississippi appearance, in the Washington Post and syndicated nationwide the next day, Young wrote an op-ed titled "Chilling Words in Neshoba County," which has since shaped today's conventional wisdom about Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign:14
Remembering that day in Mississippi, I'm obsessed with a chilling question: what 'states' rights' would candidate Reagan revive?
There is a simple and what should have been a warming answer to this, found in the sentence immediately preceding Reagan’s reference to states' rights: shifting certain taxing powers and social programs, such as welfare, from the federal to the state level to provide more effective aid to the poor. Reagan also repeatedly clarified his exact stance on states' rights and civil rights. How this context was missed remains a mystery to the previously context-keen former ambassador. Young continued:
Traditionally, these code words have been the electoral language of Wallace, Goldwater and the Nixon southern strategy. So one must ask: Is Reagan saying that he intends to do everything he can to turn the clock back to the Mississippi justice of 1964? Do the powers of the state and local governments include the right to end the voting rights of black citizens? Would Reagan dare to commission, directly or indirectly, the Sheriff Raineys and the vigilantes to ride once again, poisoning the political process with hatred and violence? [...]
Yet the nightriders are still out there, waiting for the day when federal protection of voting rights and civil rights is withdrawn.
That is why code words like "states' rights" and symbolic places like Philadelphia, Miss., leave me cold.
The Democratic strategy to paint Reagan as an extremist was underway, and Young desperately wanted America to believe it was George Wallace on that Mississippi stage, not Ronald Reagan. While the segregationist symbolism can be discussed later, it’s crucial to recognize Young's emotional manipulation for what it was: an attempt to frighten black people with the threat of potential physical violence if Reagan were elected and to scare white people into thinking that if they voted for Reagan it would be a racist act that would harm black Americans.
Young claimed that Reagan’s speech in Mississippi reminded him of the violence of 1964, suggesting that Reagan's election would revive the murderous racist “nightriders,” and that only a vote for Jimmy Carter would protect us. Listen to Reagan's speech yourself and judge whether Young's portrayal is responsible. Are we still to take Young’s perspective seriously? How gullible are we?
It’s understandable that Andrew Young is reminded of the Mississippi civil rights murders, as he often invoked them. Just the week prior, Young referenced the same murders while discussing the Democratic Party’s turmoil of 1964. Young feared the peril of a contested DNC in 1980 and called for compromise, unity, and an inspired constituency to support, coincidentally, Jimmy Carter:15
[…] the 1980 convention might be “Atlantic City Revisited” — reminiscent of 1964, when the Democrats assembled in a volatile atmosphere but emerged with a convention marked by compromise and unity.
That year, the party was in turmoil over civil rights and rampant lawlessness across the South. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had been murdered for attempting to register voters in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. […]
A struggle in New York is no doubt inevitable and possibly healthy, but, in the context of 1980, it is dangerous. [emphasis added]
Oakland Tribune, 03 August 1980.
At a campaign fundraiser in the key swing state of Ohio, Young told the crowd to consider Carter’s re-election as “not just a vote for Jimmy Carter … but as a vote for a whole system of black administrators.” He continued, “I am worried about America for my children and my children’s children,” warning that if blacks did not vote for Jimmy Carter in November, “It’s because niggers stayed home, that niggers are being treated like niggers.”16
Springfield News-Sun, 23 August 1980.
While most saw through the tactics of Carter and his attack surrogates, the Reagan campaign still aimed to build a relationship with black voters. This included continuously reminding voters of Reagan's position on “state’s rights.” In a campaign memo meant for black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, campaign officials reiterated Reagan's stance:
Despite Reagan’s clear position, Carter’s vile campaign tactics were not limited to surrogate op-eds. In October, Carter gave his last, most desperate, appeal in Chicago:
You’ll determine whether or not this America will be unified. Or, if I lose this election, whether America might be separated - black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban…
According to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter was the only thing holding the country together. Even the left-leaning media couldn’t defend the depths of this demagoguery. James Reston in the New York Times spoke about Carter’s Chicago statement and his desperate response to slipping further in the polls in October:
Carter’s reaction to this was, first, to imply that Reagan was a “racist,” and then that he was a threat to the peace. When this not only outraged his opponents but was condemned in the press and by many of his own friends [...]
With this attitude, he has been his own worst enemy, for he has allowed campaign tactics to overwhelm principles: the sense of decency and generosity that brought him to the White House in the first place. [...] it will obviously be his last campaign, whether he wins or loses. But so far it has been such a vicious and personal campaign that even if he wins, it will be difficult for him to regain the support he needs to govern.
Reston was generous about how Carter was elected in 1976 but still informative about how these desperate Carter tactics were perceived leading up to the election.
Reagan rightly said Carter reached a “point of hysteria,” third party candidate Anderson accused the Carter campaign of a “desperate attempt to reduce the campaign to absurd simplicities.”17
The media had started to see through these Carter tactics months before, headlines and editorials from across the political spectrum made this clear: “[Carter’s] slur is unwarranted,”18 and “Hair-Raising Exercise In Demagoguery.”19
After media criticism in September, even President Carter realized that the juice was not worth the squeeze, acknowledging, “I do not think that my opponent [Ronald Reagan] is racist in any degree.”20
Newsday, 19 September 1980.
Andrew Young however doubled down when he told another Ohio audience in October that Reagan’s reference to states’ rights, “looks like a code word to me that it’s going to be all right to kill niggers when he’s President.”21 The Carter administration responded by repudiating Young:
The remark attributed to Mr. Young does not represent the President’s view. At his last press conference, the President made clear that he does not believe that Governor Reagan is a racist or is running a campaign of racism. He has also stated that he regrets the injection of the racial issue into the present campaign and would like to see it eliminated.
This depraved demagoguery did not go unnoticed, Steven Wiseman of the New York Times had been reporting on it for months:
In interviews, several Carter-Mondale strategists, who asked not to be identified, agreed that the President had “gone overboard” last week in suggesting that his Republican opponent had engaged in racism. This week Jody Powell, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that Mr. Carter had “overstated” the case in suggesting that Mr. Reagan might lead the country into war. [...]
As described by Carter-Mondale aides, their strategy is to convince the voters that these issues are more important, say, than the economic ones. [...]
As for the suggestion last week that Mr. Reagan was advocating “racism,” Carter-Mondale campaign aides said this accusation was aimed specifically at black Americans, whose enthusiasm for Mr. Carter is seen as diminished this year. The one way to increase their enthusiasm, campaign aides assert, is to portray Mr. Reagan as dangerous to their interests.
The New York Times, 26 September 1980.
The Carter campaign admitted to using the charge of racism against Reagan because Carter was slipping in black support and to avoid the issue of the horrendous economy. Even during the campaign, they admitted to having “gone overboard” and “overstated” Reagan attacks. Liberal New York Times columnist Tom Wicker saw this as a revealing admission in a piece aptly titled, “A Calculated Contempt” wherein he read the obvious score:
But the Carter campaign seems remarkable for several reasons. The strategists who talked to Steve Weisman made it clear, for instance, that the innuendo and exaggerations are calculated—even, in their view, soundly calculated; yet, Mr. Carter maintains his pious and smiling manner [...]
[Carter] expects that public to swallow his exaggerated attacks on Mr. Reagan and his continuing claims to virtue, while his aides concede that the attacks are deliberately designed to manipulate the same public. Do he and they really take us to be so gullible? Are we?
More than 40 years later—the answer to Tom Wicker’s question is yes.
The 1980 Ronald Reagan Series:
Notes:
1 The San Bernardino County Sun, 25 March 1980.
2 Harris Survey, August 1980.
3 Associated Press, 04 August 1980.
4 Philadelphia Daily News, 12 August 1980.
5 Oakland Tribune, 29 October 1980.
6 The Tribune, 15 August 1980.
7 Tim Wyngaard, Scripts-Howard, 14 December 1976.
8 The Columbus Ledger, 07 November 1976.
9 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 15 July 1976.
10 The Bradenton Herald, 20 December 1976.
11 The Evening Sun, 04 August 1976.
12 The Miami Herald, 14 December 1976.
13 Springfield News-Sun, 23 August 1980.
14 Washington Post, 11 August 1980.
15 Oakland Tribune, 03 August 1980.
16 Springfield News-Sun, 23 August 1980.
17 Associated Press, 07 October 1980.
18 Times-Advocate, 19 September 1980.
19 Washington Star, September 1980.
20 Newsday, 19 September 1980.
21 The New York Times, 16 October 1980.
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