This presidential election season, we’ve been occasionally recounting stories from another, much more lively primary race nearly 50 years ago.
Ben Bradford is the host of the new podcast "Landslide," which is about the 1976 race — the contest between President Gerald Ford and Gov. Ronald Reagan — and how it led to today’s partisan gulf. And he’s with me now to talk about North Carolina’s role.
Marshall Terry: So the last episode of "Landslide" tells the story of the North Carolina primary, which was a huge comeback for Reagan.
Ben Bradford: That’s right. Reagan had lost the first five primaries of 1976 in a row, and it looked like he would lose North Carolina. And that would push him out of the race; it probably ends his national political career. If that happens, then the Republican Party as we know it today perhaps does not exist. But instead, Reagan has this comeback. And he does it by galvanizing voters with new issues that really inspire them that we talk through in the episode, and with this movement of grassroots conservatives getting behind him. And North Carolina becomes this hinge point that leads to a huge comeback.
Terry: That North Carolina win kicks off a string of victories for Reagan. What happens then?
Bradford: Well, the contest goes all the way to the Republican National Convention, which is the focus of our next episode, coming out Thursday. It was a tooth-and-nail fight, it came to be called the "Shoot-Out in Kansas City." No one knew what would happen.
Terry: North Carolina plays another role at the convention. Tell us about that.
Bradford: So, the convention — and our episode — really comes down to this wonky thing: the delegates themselves. The actual human beings who get elected to go to the convention and cast their votes for a candidate.
Usually, we think of delegates as having this role of voting for a very specific candidate that they were sent there for. But delegates play this other kind of unsung role, which is that these human beings also vote on the platform, which is what the party stands for, and on rules. And, on those, they can do whatever they want.
In 1976, the nomination is so close that the rules fights and platform fights are, in this kind of Rube Goldbergian way we discuss, what’s going to decide the nomination.
Even though Ford is slightly ahead in the official delegate count, Reagan has this advantage: a lot of the actual human beings who are delegates would prefer to see him win.
So take North Carolina. Reagan had won this close race in North Carolina in the primary. So he’d only gotten like three more delegates than Ford. But one of the architects of the win in North Carolina, Carter Wrenn, says they wanted to ensure all of the delegates, even the ones that had to vote for Ford on the nomination, that all these human beings, preferred Reagan. And so they launched this massive effort at the state and local party conventions where delegates are selected.
And they did it — every delegate from North Carolina was one of theirs. They even managed to block the governor of the state, Jim Holshouser, from being a delegate. It gave Reagan an edge otherwise he wouldn’t have had. It also did this other thing: it changed the inside of North Carolina’s Republican Party.
"Landslide" is produced by NuanceTales in partnership with WFAE, and is part of the NPR Network. Episodes come out weekly and available wherever you get your podcasts.
