Almost half a century ago, Jimmy Carter carried the battleground state of Wisconsin by 1.7 points. That has a pretty familiar ring today, when tight elections are the absolute norm in this state.
But in more important ways, the election landscape of 1976 is unrecognizable to the modern eye.
Carter, whose funeral services take place Thursday in Washington, D.C., lived so long (100 years) that his life after the White House spanned profound social, cultural, economic and political change.
My focus here is on how different the political geography of the nation and of Wisconsin is today compared to when Carter became president.
Using that lens, revisiting his election is a jaw-dropping exercise. It might as well have occurred in another country.Consider just two huge differences between the election landscape of 1976 and the election landscape of 2024.
One is that we are way more polarized geographically today than we were then. In 1976, for example, 31 of the 50 states were decided by single digits. In 2024, only 13 were. The reddest states are redder now and the bluest states are bluer.
The other big difference involves the two parties’ regional coalitions. The red-blue map of today is vastly different than the red-blue map of the 1970s.
You can see these differences not only at the national level but also in the country’s most reliably competitive state, Wisconsin.
Let’s start with how the national playing field has changed.
The “blue” states in the 1976 presidential election included Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana and Missouri. All voted for Carter, the Democratic challenger from the Deep South. All these states have been lopsidedly “red” for decades now.
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Carter’s victory was the very last time Democrats ever carried Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina or Texas for president.
The “red” states in 1976 included Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois and California. All voted for Republican President Gerald Ford, the former vice president and Michigan congressman. All these states have been safely blue in presidential elections since the 1990s.
Carter’s election was the last time Louisiana was bluer than New York, and the last time Arkansas was bluer than Massachusetts. West Virginia was the third-best state for Democrats in 1976. It was the second-worst state for Democrats in 2024.
What is behind these changes? Amid a lot of broader social and demographic change, the two major parties (which both used to have conservative and liberal wings) have polarized over time into a party of the right and a party of the left. That has altered their demographic and regional makeup.
The Deep South and mid-South have undergone a decades-long shift from blue to red, starting in the Civil Rights era and continuing through the Reagan era. The northeast and West Coast have shifted in a sharply blue direction. This realignment backtracked briefly under two southern Democratic presidents, Carter and Bill Clinton of Arkansas. But over the decades it transformed the map.
In demographic terms, working-class, rural and evangelical white voters have all been migrating to the GOP, as white college grads, suburbanites and secular voters have been moving in a Democratic direction.
As the fault lines between the parties have shifted, the gap between red and blue places has gotten dramatically bigger. It’s hard to comprehend today, but in that 1976 election, 26 states — more than half — were decided by less than 6 points, compared to just 11 today. In 1976, 15 states were decided by less than 3 points, compared to 5 today. Only six states in 1976 were decided by 20 points or more, compared to 19 in 2024.
More: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter built houses in Milwaukee and their Habitat for Humanity work in the city still stands
Geographic polarization has produced a radically smaller playing field, leaving the vast majority of voters on the sidelines and presidential elections in the hands of just a few states. Basically, five states have decided the past three elections: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.
Wisconsin, one of those pivotal states, is a microcosm of these national trends. It is far more polarized geographically than it was in the 1970s, and the party’s regional coalitions have changed in striking ways.
It may shock you to learn that in the 1976 election, the state’s 15 most Democratic counties did not include Milwaukee or Dane. The places that gave Carter his biggest point margins were all small counties in northern and western Wisconsin. Carter won them by an average of 21 points.
In 2024, Democrat Kamala Harris lost these same 15 counties by an average of 13 points. In other words, these counties — places like Burnett, Pepin, Clark, Oconto and Chippewa — shifted in a Republican direction by an average of 34 points between Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976 and Donald Trump’s election in 2024. Five counties in northern Wisconsin have moved more than 50 points in a Republican direction: Rusk, Forest, Taylor, Iron, and Florence.
On the flip side, La Crosse County in western Wisconsin went from being one of the state’s reddest counties in 1976 to one of its bluest in 2024.
Suburban, upscale Ozaukee was the state’s single most Republican county in 1976. Ford carried it by 27 points. Ozaukee was the 51st most Republican County in 2024 (out of 72).
Back then, Dane and Milwaukee ranked 16th and 17th in the size of Carter’s winning margin. They are now routinely among the three bluest counties in Wisconsin. Dane, Milwaukee and La Crosse are the counties that have moved the most in a Democratic direction compared to 1976. Because of their size, they have largely offset the even bigger shifts in a Republican direction of dozens of smaller rural counties.
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Which is why all these changes have not altered the state’s overall competitiveness.
In you go back to that 1976 election, the 15 closest states (all decided by under 3 points) were in order of closeness: Oregon, Ohio, Maine, Iowa, Oklahoma, Virginia, South Dakota, Wisconsin, California, Mississippi, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, Hawaii and Pennsylvania.
Only Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are presidential battlegrounds today.
In fact, over the last half-century, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have easily been on average the two closest states (Wisconsin first, Pennsylvania second), whether you base it on the past three elections, the past seven, the past 10 or the past 13.
But there is nothing that says that these states will remain static amid the constant change in our politics, the ongoing realignment of the Trump era, and whatever our post-Trump politics looks like.
One year we may look back at the 2024 election the way we look back at the 1976 election, as a foreign landscape.
Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.
Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gilbert: How Jimmy Carter’s Wisconsin of 1976 has changed dramatically
