Marching North from Georgia

Torn asunder by George McGovern's poorly executed and unsettling "New Left" campaign in 1972, the old Democratic coalition--for decades a dominant force in national elections--seemed to have passed forever from the political scene. Consisting of a strange collection"of minority bedfellows--ethnic blue-collar workers (mostly Catholic), blacks, Southern whites, Jews and campus-oriented intellectuals--it appeared unlikely to be born again under any Democratic presidential nominee, let alone a small-town Georgian. Yet on Election Day 1976, the coalition reemerged. Some parts creaked badly, some were hardly recognizable, and others seemed to be missing. But the resurrected coalition held together well enough to enable Jimmy Carter to eke out his narrow victory.

Many conservative and moderate Democrats were appalled when, after the national convention, Carter made bald appeals to some of the elements of the old coalition that seemed cool to his candidacy. His choice of Walter Mondale as a running mate was part of that plan. Norbert Dreiling, former Kansas Democratic state chairman, felt that Carter had "blown" the campaign by spending too much time "trying to woo back the liberal wing of the party." Pollster Lou Harris also believed that Carter had taken a large risk by retreating from his independent stance, his widely perceived conservatism, and going after the recalcitrant groups of the coalition. "What he apparently failed to consider," said Harris, "was that the elements of the old coalition, which constituted some 60% of the electorate during F.D.R.'s days, now make up only 43% of the voters. At the same time, the groups that Ford appealed to--college graduates, suburbanites, white-collar workers--have been growing in numbers."

Still, despite a flawed campaign, Carter's strategy worked.

The 1976 election map tells part of the story. For the first time since 1944, the South was solid again, or nearly so; of the eleven Southern states, all but Virginia came home to the Democratic Party. In the Northeast, most of the populous industrial states--dominated by elements of the coalition--also returned. Throughout the country, blacks, who never left the party, gave Carter overwhelming margins. Union members voted in large numbers for the Democratic candidate. The Irish, Jews and Eastern Europeans were back in the fold, though in smaller numbers than the Democrats had hoped. Italians, perhaps out of the coalition for good, stayed with the G.O.P. by a small margin. But they were replaced by some newcomers, previously Republican white Protestants and farmers.

To sketch out the anatomy of the vote, TIME correspondents across the nation kept close tab on carefully selected, representative precincts on Election Night, interviewing voters and comparing the final vote tallies with those of previous elections. From their reports, the following analysis of key voting groups emerges:

THE BLACKS: DECISIVE

Without the overwhelming support for Carter among blacks--many of whom felt that he had lived among them, understood them and had fought for their civil rights--Gerald Ford would have been elected. Among the nation's white voters, Ford won 51% of the vote to Carter's 48% (the remainder being divided among Eugene McCarthy, Lester Maddox and others). Blacks made the difference by giving Carter a healthy 84% of their vote; in one black Raleigh, N.C., precinct, for example, the vote was: Carter, 1,130; Ford, 27. In New York City, blacks got the message in a campaign pamphlet titled, No Butz about Jimmy Carter. It said, in part, that "the issue isn't a Playboy interview or whether he lusts after women. It's unemployment. And he was a good Governor in that he brought women and blacks into his agencies, established a recruitment program for blacks and a sickle-cell-anemia foundation."

SOUTHERN WHITES: BACK AGAIN

Jimmy Carter was one of their own, and Southerners responded to a Democratic candidate as they had not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Said one Democratic state chairman: "We've been telling people that it's taken 128 years for a person from the Deep South to get nominated, and if they hope to see their sons and daughters in a position to run for President, they'd better vote for Carter." They did. For example, among white Baptists, most of whom live in the South and have been voting Republican in recent elections (some 77% voted for Nixon in 1972), Carter got more than 56% of the vote. In one precinct of Georgia's De Kalb County, which gave Richard Nixon an overwhelming tally in 1968, Ford won by only 747 to 727.

THE JEWS: SLIPPING AWAY

Richard Nixon captured nearly 40% of the Jewish vote in 1972, one of the largest percentages ever won by a Republican candidate. President Ford took an even bigger bite out of the Jewish wing of the coalition, getting about 45% of a group that is traditionally heavily Democratic. In Miami Beach's largely Jewish Precinct 480, for example, voters, who in 1968 gave Hubert Humphrey a 391-to-111 edge over Richard Nixon, this time actually endorsed Ford over Carter by a 551-to-481 vote. Some of Ford's popularity among Jews stemmed from the undiminished flow of U.S. arms to Israel, but many Jews were also uneasy about Carter's religious philosophy. Said Ellis Rubin, a North Beach, Fla., lawyer: "When a guy keeps telling you he's more religious than you are and keeps wearing his badge on his sleeve, you begin to wonder. Jews have always been concerned about the separation of church and state."

CATHOLICS AND ETHNICS: DEFECTING

Once the mainstay of the coalition, white Catholics this year gave Ford just over half their vote. Although Carter's religion and his abortion stand influenced some, busing and school desegregation, which have stirred anti-black sentiment in many Catholic urban neighborhoods, may be the biggest factor in the continuing drift toward the G.O.P. For example, despite Carter's determined efforts to woo Italian votes ("I think it's a shame that someone of Italian background has never been appointed to the Supreme Court"), more than 55% of the Italian vote went to Ford. In the 24th Ward of St. Louis, a predominantly Italian, blue-collar area where 7,000 of the 9,000 voters are Catholic, Carter won by a less than 2-to-l ratio; Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey each took the ward by nearly 3 to 1. Said St. Louis Democratic Chairman Paul Berra: "Carter's firm stand on the Democratic abortion plank clearly cost him votes."

Among other ethnic groups, Carter did better. In Rhode Island, which has the highest unemployment rate in the nation (11%), Catholic blue-collar workers, responding to union drives, cast thousands of pocketbook votes for Carter, helping him sweep the state. Said Margaret McKenna, Carter's campaign chairman in Rhode Island: "The turnout was big because the people feared that another term for Ford would have been disastrous for the state. The economy has been in constant decline in Rhode Island, and Ford was blamed for it." Carter also took some 56% of the Irish and about 55% of the Eastern European vote. But Mike Sotiros, a director of the Ford campaign in New York State, feels that Carter's barrage of references to Ford's debate faux pas about Eastern Europeans actually helped Ford cut into Carter's margin in this group. Says he: "It gave Ford Erie County (Buffalo) with its 300,000 Polish votes. Carter should have let the gaffe lie."

WHITE PROTESTANTS: NEW BLOOD

Carter made up for some of the Democratic losses among coalition groups by capturing nearly 50% of the white Protestant vote, compared with 30% for George McGovern in 1972 and generally higher than Democratic candidates have received in recent elections. Some of this gain obviously represents the white Baptist switch. But much of it comes from rural areas where farmers felt an affinity with their Georgia counterpart and hostility toward the Ford Administration because of the 1974 embargo on wheat sales to the Soviet Union. In Montgomery County, a rural wheat-growing area in southeastern Kansas that usually gives 60% of its vote to the G.O.P. contender, Ford won by 8,410 to 6,920--or only 54%. Carter also made inroads in the Republican farm vote in Oklahoma's northwestern wheat country, and was put over the top in his Wisconsin win by farmers.

Still, it was the South, finally, that made Carter's march north from Georgia feasible. Carter does not end up as a figure who is very popular nationally; though he received 52% of the vote in the East, he lost the Midwest (49%) and the West (46.8%). It was also, for America, notes Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, an election that fractured to a marked degree along the fault line separating the haves and havenots. The affluent, the well-educated, the suburbanites largely went for Ford; the socially and economically disadvantaged for Carter. Thus Carter is in a position similar to that of John Kennedy in 1960 and of Richard Nixon in 1968--a winner by a whisker who must still create a national following and prove himself to a truly broad constituency.

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