DES MOINES, Iowa — In 1975, political consultant Tim Kraft’s job was to turn “Jimmy who?” into Jimmy Carter, the bona fide presidential contender.
It was a tall order for a first-term Georgia governor. He was almost entirely unknown outside his home state, had no money and boasted just a tiny campaign infrastructure.
But Kraft had read about George McGovern’s extraordinary 1972 Democratic primary campaign, which saw the little-known senator ride a surprise showing in the Iowa Caucuses to the nomination. He’d studied how McGovern’s team leveraged the dynamics of a caucus — which with lower turnouts and cheaper costs than a primary lent themselves well to grassroots, volunteer-driven organizing — to build an army of dedicated, hyper-engaged young caucusgoers.
Jimmy Carter campaigns at the Iowa State Fair ahead of the 1976.
Iowa had given an unknown entity enough momentum to take on party favorites once before.
That could be Carter, too, couldn’t it?
During the 1976 election cycle, former President Jimmy Carter cemented the playbook for Iowa Caucus success by meeting Iowans in small diners and coffee shops and talking to them directly about the ways the next president might be able to improve their lives. His efforts proved passion and shoe leather, not just fat wallets, could catapult a long-shot candidate all the way to the White House.
Once in office, Carter promised to make government “competent and compassionate,” but his presidency was dogged by a slow economy, an energy crisis and the Cold War. Despite being a one-term president, Carter went on to win the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his work “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
In February 2023, he had announced he was ending medical intervention and moving to hospice care. He died Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100.
Carter’s improbable run rationalized Iowa’s role as the nation’s earliest adjudicator of presidential elections for five decades, launching a uniquely American political tradition. A new election calendar was set in the fall of 2023, promoting South Carolina and kicking Iowa from its leadoff spot, but Carter’s role in Iowa Caucus history remains intact — its legend buoyed by a few overpriced chicken dinners and just a little sleight of hand.
More: The death of the Iowa Democratic caucus: How 50 years of jury-rigging doomed an American tradition
Jimmy Carter and the Iowa Caucuses needed each other
While Carter’s team sketched out possible avenues to victory in Iowa, then-Iowa Democratic Party Chair Tom Whitney sought his own path to success.
Whitney had also watched the unlikely rise of McGovern, how his “exceeding expectations” result had made Iowa — a state hundreds of miles from coastal political and media power bases — seem prescient in the aftermath of the primary cycle.
National attention could help Iowa Democrats generate contributions and new voters, Whitney figured. So when he took over in 1973, he began to drum up publicity for the newly minted first-in-the-nation contest by casting the state as candidates’ preeminent proving ground. Would-be presidents could come here to make their case directly to the people and be rewarded for it.
“We organized a very, very significant kind of effort to convince first the candidates that they ought to be in Iowa because the national press was going to be here, and then to convince the national press that they should be in Iowa because the candidates were going to be here,” he said in a 2007 interview with Iowa Public Television.
Politicians needed the media, and the media needed a story. Whitney’s caucuses were happy to play backdrop to both. The symbiotic relationship that would come to define the way America picks presidents was born.
Jimmy Carter’s first ‘win’ in Iowa was over a chicken dinner
The first test of this new partnership came in October 1975 at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner, a statewide event with all the political theater of a national convention.
Building on the hype, the Des Moines Register announced it would hold a straw poll to gauge support for each presidential contender a few months ahead of the actual caucus. But the Register would count the votes only of those who paid $25 for a boxed chicken dinner and a seat on the floor. Everyone else could pay $2 to watch from the sidelines.
Devoted Carter supporters were wary of the steeper price, but wanted to be counted.
“To me,” Kraft said in a written account of the campaign, it was “an open invitation to infiltrate.”
‘Political guerrilla warfare’: The Iowa caucus legend grows as Jimmy Carter cements a presidential playbook
The campaign organized volunteers to flood the event, suggesting that they might want to buy the $2 tickets and casually work their way to the floor to secure a ballot.
A campaign supporter reserved a section of seats inside the auditorium — front row — where they’d be on full display for the media. Somebody else found boxes of straw hats and affixed Carter bumper stickers to their brims, ensuring their allegiance was obvious to the cameras.
“It was political guerrilla warfare at its best,” Kraft said in an interview, recalling the night fondly.
Carter handily won the straw poll and, more importantly, the battle for visibility.
The result “was rocket fuel” to the campaign, Kraft would later say in a speech at the Hoover Library, and it put Carter on the national map.
Or, at least, in the pages of The New York Times.
“Carter Appears to Hold a Solid Lead in Iowa as the Campaign’s First Test Approaches,” the headline read over legendary political reporter R.W. Apple Jr.’s writeup.
Carter and his campaign had taken what McGovern learned to a new level. Now, all he had to do was deliver a surprise on caucus night.
For his part, Whitney was looking for that kind of attention, too — any storyline that would put Iowa’s caucuses in the evening news’ A block.
Jimmy Carter during a campaign stop at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 25, 1976.
All eyes were on Jimmy Carter’s win in Iowa — after some caucus sleight of hand
Indeed, when caucus night finally came around, everyone who was anyone in American political journalism flocked to Des Moines to cover the Iowa Caucuses — all of them aware that during the last go-around, Iowa had foretold a change in the political winds.
This time, nobody wanted to be left in the dust.
Ready to prove that Iowa had become the political destination he’d envisioned, Whitney eagerly awaited the results as they trickled in, preparing to unveil them to the assembled throngs. He’d even offered Iowans the chance to watch the media at work for $10 a head, a ticket that came with a front-row seat to history and two drinks.
The entire political world seemed to ache for clear, measurable data — anything empirical that would make sense of the field.
‘How can anyone trust you?’: The Iowa Democratic caucus collapses in a spectacular crash
But with 85% of precincts reporting, the delegate count was far from impressive, according to a Wall Street Journal account. Jimmy Carter had won 8 delegates — well short of the 39 delegates awarded to “uncommitted.” None of the other candidates had enough support to claim any delegates at all.
This was not the clear, politically prescient result Whitney wanted to sell to the media.
But what if those weren’t the results?
After surveying the party’s statistician and a few trusted confidants, Whitney came up with a plan to ignore the party’s rule that a candidate must win at least 15% support to collect any delegates — a rule designed to weed out weaker candidates and help Iowa Democrats build consensus, according to the Journal.
Jimmy Carter at the Iowa State Fair in 1976.
Even with this new math, uncommitted came out on top with 18 delegates. But the gap had closed between “no one” and Carter, who was awarded 13. And some of the other candidates — Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, Morris Udall and Sargent Shriver — picked up a handful of delegates, enough to make it seem like a race.
Days later, the Register highlighted Whitney’s sleight of hand. “The projections by the state party added an element of certainty that simply doesn’t exist,” political reporter James Flansburg wrote in the Sunday paper.
But it didn’t matter. The narrative had taken hold: Carter had “won” in Iowa.
The momentum of the political machine shifted, giving him weight and credibility as he competed in later states and famously propelling him to the Democratic nomination and then the presidency.
The blueprint for every long-shot candidate who followed was written. There was no looking back.
For better or worse, Iowa’s caucuses wouldn’t be just a measure of political reality.
They would create political reality.
This is an excerpt of the Register’s three-part series, The Death of the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, which traces how a well-intentioned accident grew into a national spectacle and finally a fiasco. Read the entire story here.
Brianne Pfannenstiel is the chief politics reporter for the Register. Reach her at [email protected] or 515-284-8244. Follow her on Twitter at @brianneDMR.
Courtney Crowder is the Iowa Columnist and a senior writer at the Register. Reach her at [email protected] or 515-284-8360. Follow her on Twitter at @courtneycare.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: How Jimmy Carter created the Iowa Caucuses presidential playbook
