Ten presidents out of 45 have tried for a second term and been denied. Those odds might sound good at trivia night at the pub, but in the past 50 years, a number of vulnerable presidents who faced primary challenges from determined upstarts inside their party have sustained long-term injuries. An unpopular president may struggle onto the ticket, but the political toll of that struggle is real. In 1976, President Gerald Ford bested Ronald Reagan in the primary, but the damage contributed to a ripple effect: The president lost to Jimmy Carter. Four years later, Carter became a casualty of Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy’s last attempt at the presidency. Carter made it back onto the ticket, but he lost the general election to Reagan. As the midterm elections approach and we consider how President Joe Biden’s political capital will fare, a look back at how low approval ratings and party infighting combined to hobble Ford and Carter seems overdue.
First, the elephant in the room: Biden is the oldest president in American history. He took office at 78, the same age Reagan was when he left the White House. If Biden serves a second term, he’ll be 86 at the end of it.* This big number is unprecedented, but age isn’t Biden’s greatest weakness. Despite his recent legislative successes and the halo effect Democrats have been enjoying in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Biden’s still unpopular. His approval ratings hit a record low in July, and he’s still just a tick above 40 percent. No truly determined challengers have emerged from the scrum of Democratic presidential hopefuls waiting in the wings, but will Biden’s late-summer “Dark Brandon” period be enough for a good midterm performance, which might save him from the fate Ford and Carter suffered as unpopular first-termers? Only time will tell.
Vice presidents who ascend to the highest office inherit a powerful tool: nostalgia.
In January 2021, 56 percent of Americans thought Biden, whom they remembered for his close relationship with Barack Obama, was doing a good job. Unelected presidents have fared even better. Harry Truman enjoyed an 87 percent approval rating after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office; Lyndon B. Johnson polled at 78 percent after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But Ford’s high 71 percent approval rating in August 1974 was only possible because Richard Nixon became the first president in American history to resign. Ford made history when he was promoted, too; he’d never been elected to either office. The monthlong honeymoon ended abruptly when, in September, in the name of national unity, Ford granted Nixon a full and unconditional pardon.
By 1976, Ford entered primary season with a 46 percent approval rating, and he couldn’t blame it all on Nixon. He oversaw the worst economy since the Great Depression—an energy crisis, high unemployment, and inflation—and didn’t offer much relief. Ford, an establishment Republican who believed in small government and fiscal conservatism, was sidelined by a Democrat-controlled Congress—and he returned the favor. During his 29 months in office, he vetoed 66 Democratic bills. His foreign policy didn’t fare much better. On April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. Americans had lost 58,000 lives in a war they could, for the first time, watch from home, and the end of that war was no less traumatic. They saw Vietnamese allies grasping at the tracks of fleeing helicopters and packing into the U.S. Embassy courtyard like sardines.
Still, the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, in the summer of 1976 should have been Ford’s coronation. A sitting president is the de facto leader of his party, a position that should be sacred in a fraught election year, but Reagan, a glamourous outsider, pounced. The Boca Raton News recognized his strategy: When Reagan, “the Trumpet of law and order,” was asked whether Nixon, on whom he had been “strangely mute,” had cast a shadow over the primaries, he issued a damning redirect: “You have to ask the man who pardoned him.” Ford’s defense was comparatively milquetoast. “I was approved by a Democratic Congress overwhelmingly, in the House and Senate, which clearly indicates on the record I have no connection whatsoever with Watergate,” he explained in the kind of flat language destined for the pages of an uninspired high school textbook.
The media turned to anonymous sources for juicier quotes. Behind the scenes, Ford was “privately furious over Ronald Reagan’s criticisms of his policies,” which sent “blood coursing through his veins.” Still, Ford refused to utter the Gipper’s name in public until the spring, when Reagan tirelessly toured the nation attacking Ford’s foreign policy. Under the headline “Ford Assails Reagan View on Defense as ‘Simplistic,’ ” the New York Times noted the subtle change: “The President made clear today that he was talking about ‘my opponent.’ ”
Behind closed doors, the Ford campaign’s last-ditch efforts to neutralize Reagan sounded like a wish upon a star: What good was the promise, coming from an unelected president, of being the ambassador to St. James’ or the secretary of commerce? As a self-appointed thorn in Ford’s side, Reagan was able to influence the president’s policy on national security. “Most famously, Ford stopped using the term détente—which was incredibly controversial on the right,” Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton, pointed out in an email, “and called for higher defense spending.” Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s secretary of defense, pushed the issue on Main Street, and it worked. “It was enough to somewhat strengthen his standing with those in the GOP who were looking for a little more Goldwater in the political bloodstream,” Zelizer added.
“Nobody had ever dared to run against an incumbent before,” John Sears, Reagan’s campaign manager, boasted, even though Estes Kefauver had challenged Harry Truman in 1952 and Eugene McCarthy went after Johnson in 1968. Yet there’s no denying that, in 1976, the disaffection-rich air diffused across the Republican National Convention, where it was inhaled at every level. A Ford delegate broke her leg but refused to go to the hospital until after the vote; she didn’t trust a replacement. Henry Kissinger, Ford’s secretary of state, threatened to quit if the roll call was delayed because the “convention delegates had gone all over hell town and came back half soused.” Jack Ford, one of Ford’s sons, was accused of dumping (literal) trash on Reagan supporters. Forty years later, he maintains his innocence: “Mom was sitting beside me, and she wouldn’t let me.” In his memory, “it just happened to fall on the Texas delegation, because they were sitting right in front of us.” Even Vice President Nelson Rockefeller wasn’t above the fray.* Handed a Reagan sign, he said—facetiously—“I wanted to preserve it, so I sat on it. Everything was fine until that fellow from Utah came over.” That “fellow,” a Utah delegate, thought he had stolen it. As retribution, he ripped a telephone out of Rockefeller’s hands before he was escorted out of the building.
“Reagan owned our delegates emotionally,” complained Stu Spencer, a deputy chairman for Ford, and Reagan knew it. “If there had been a secret ballot,” said Lou Cannon, a Washington Post reporter, “Reagan would have won and been the nominee.” The numbers suggest he was right: Ford secured the nomination by only 117 votes; 1,187 delegates supported the incumbent compared with Reagan’s 1,070 votes.
Still, the loser emerged as the victor, and the victor as the loser. Bob Dole marveled that Reagan had the audience “in the palm of his hand,” even as he made his concession speech, and he kept them there for the next four years while he criticized Carter, who beat a weakened Ford in the general election by a narrow margin. To Republicans, Reagan was “the one who got away,” and that set him up nicely for the 1980 election, when Reagan beat Carter by a landslide. It was the second successive election in which a presidential incumbent had been defeated—but if that election seems like a foregone conclusion in hindsight, you may not know Jimmy Carter as well as you think.
“Carter would have cut my head off to carry North Dakota,” gonzo journalist Hunter S.
Thompson said in a 1977 interview. “Cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx.” Thompson, who had known a lot of “mean” men in his life, ranked Carter among the top three, adding, “he never apologizes. That’s how he won.” Strategy had something to do with it, too. In 1966, Carter, then a Georgia state senator, lost the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to Lester Maddox, a staunch segregationist who chased Black customers out of his restaurant with a pickax handle. By the next election, Carter was out of office and, he told Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, made a tactical decision. “Did I want to be governor of Georgia or did I want to be in the Civil Rights Movement? I chose to be the Governor of Georgia.” The path there was lined with racists. “Anybody who wants to support me, I support them,” Carter said in defense of his visit to Roy Harrisburg, the founder of the White Citizens’ Council in Georgia. But “the most significant” choice he made, Alter said in an interview, “is that he promised to have George Wallace address the state legislature.” If Carter’s racist supporters hoped Wallace, the governor of Alabama, would get his speechwriter, Ku Klux Klan leader Asa Earl Carter, to write something along the lines of his infamous 1963 inaugural speech—“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—they were disappointed. When Carter made it to the governor’s mansion, he declared that “the time for racial discrimination is over.”
Alter credits Rosalynn, Carter’s wife, “with the political brains in the family.” When he was governor, she advised him to lead as if he intended to serve one term, “so we didn’t have anything to protect.” Carter listened, and though he left Georgia a deeply unpopular figure, he figured that, as president, a national audience would reward similarly bold decision-making with a second term. This time, Rosalynn wasn’t so sure. “She asked him,” Alter explained, “ ‘Can’t you do this in your second term?’ ”
Carter’s presidency is so misremembered that we assume the issues we associate with his political demise always plagued him. Contemporary newspaper accounts and polls tell a different tale. When Iranian college students took 52 United States diplomats and citizens hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the nation approved of Carter’s initial response.
His allegedly unpopular “malaise speech,” which emphasized civic sacrifice at a time when cars lined up for gas blocks away from the pump, and unemployment was high and inflation unforgiving, received bipartisan support. “Even Pat Buchanan liked it,” Alter exclaimed, “but then Carter did one of the dumbest things in his presidency.”
In July 1979, Carter saw an 11 percentage point hike in his approval rating as a mandate for tough love. He summoned his Cabinet and senior staff and demanded they submit resignations. Six Cabinet members walked that day, and more followed. But voters weren’t encouraged; Nixon had made the same choice in 1972. His next move, Alter said, put Carter “in the crapper.” After six months of failed negotiations, he ordered a disastrous military rescue mission in Tehran; eight U.S. service members died without saving a single American. The hostages spent another 270 days in Tehran. Carter entered the primaries with the lowest approval rating of any president in American history, and worst of all, he trailed 30 points behind Ted Kennedy.
The senator from Massachusetts was an unlikely rival. He shared the glamourous last name of a slain president the country grew fonder of with each passing year, but this younger Kennedy’s “big C” wasn’t Camelot. It was Chappaquiddick. In 1969, seven years before Carter became president, Kennedy crashed his car into Poucha Pond on the small island off Martha’s Vineyard. He managed to free himself and tried, he claimed, to rescue his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, but it was impossible to reconcile that defense with his actions: Kennedy fled the scene. He didn’t call for help. He reported the crash the next day. By that time, a diver had already recovered Kopechne’s body. Kennedy pleaded guilty and received a punishment that fit the family, not the crime: His license was revoked for 16 months and he sat out the 1972 and 1976 primaries, watching his prospects diminish with each presidential election.
“If Kennedy runs, I’ll whip his ass,” Carter said in 1978. It was a bold statement from a president with a 28 percent approval rating, yet it makes sense to dismiss Kennedy as unelectable. Chappaquiddick cast a shadow over his disorganized campaign, his marriage was coming to an end, he was drinking heavily, and most of his significant accomplishments in the Senate were ahead of him.
But a Kennedy is still a Kennedy, and he had been raised, along with his eight siblings, to give the bird to gatekeepers and compete until the bitter end. In 1980, he smelled blood in the water. It was his chance, party be damned, and he was going to take it. “We neglected to take into account one of the most obvious facets of Kennedy’s character,” Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, recalled. He displayed “an almost childlike self-centeredness.” The party rallied around Carter, but Kennedy relentlessly pursued him all the way to the convention. “I mean, we weren’t thinking about the country,” Harold Ickes, who worked for Kennedy, admitted in an interview. “We weren’t even thinking about the general election.
It was, ‘F— ’em.’ ”
And he did, though not as he intended. Kennedy didn’t make it onto the ticket, but the New York Times declared his speech to be “one of the great emotional outpourings of convention history.” His voice broke as he reminded people, as if it was at all necessary, of his family’s political dynasty. “In the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now: I am a part of all that I have met. Too much is taken, much abides. That which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Carter’s performance was an embarrassing contrast. “We’re the party of a great man who should’ve been president,” the president declared: “Hubert Horatio Hornblower!” He meant Hubert Humphrey, a vice president (and one-time presidential nominee) who died of cancer, not the protagonist of C.S. Forester’s novels. “Well, this is slightly awkward,” NBC’s David Brinkley said as the cameras watched Carter, who, in an attempt to join hands for the unity money shot, looked as if he was chasing the Massachusetts senator around the stage. Unlike Reagan, Kennedy wasn’t the “one who got away.” The one who stayed was the problem. If Carter was so easily eclipsed by Kennedy’s tainted glamour, he was unlikely to fare well against the Gipper. And he didn’t. In the 1980 election, Reagan beat Carter by a landslide.
Reagan and Kennedy didn’t help Ford and Carter win a second term, but they didn’t preclude it, either. If approval ratings are diagnostic tools for presidents looking at their chances at reelection, primary challengers are like second opinions. It’s up to the patient to settle upon a treatment, and both Ford and Carter misjudged their odds.
Will Biden make the same mistakes? If the midterms go well, no primary challenger emerges, his policy choices continue to resonate with the public, the economy holds, and he performs well against the Republican candidate, there’s a chance Biden could win in 2024. But if he loses, Donald Trump, or possibly Ron DeSantis, may end up in the White House. “He needs to think about the country beyond his own ambitions,” Alter warned. And his pride. In 2020, it seemed as if it was Biden’s patriotic duty to save an ailing country from Donald Trump.
In 2024, it’s a choice—and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Losing the presidency would be bad. Losing that legacy would be much worse.
Correction, Oct. 3, 2022: Due to an editing error, this article originally misidentified Joe Biden as having taken office at 77, and prospectively leaving office at age 85, if he were to win a second term. He took office at 78 and would leave office after a second term at 86. This article also originally misidentified Nelson Rockefeller as Norman Rockefeller.
