1976 — the wrong turning

Per my takedown obit of Jimmy Carter as president yesterday, we had options in 1976 — certainly on domestic policy vs Carter's neoliberalism, and possibly on his foreign policy of propping up authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, followed by saying we'd go to war to keep relatively keep Persian Gulf oil available.

No, no Green Party existed then, but the Democrats had better (and worse) options available in the 1976 primaries, starting with Wiki's page.

 The two clearly worse options, first, to get them out of the way?

George Wallace is obvious; he was still unrepentant of his past and unchanged of his present at the time. The other? Scoop Jackson, aka the Senator from Boeing, whose staff housed many neocon thinkers who started rising to prominence with him. Scoop, as an antienvironmentalist, was lesser known, but also known, as the Senator from Weyerhauser, having never met a tree he didn't like — chopped down.

Just as bad candidates would include the vanity candidate Lloyd Bentson.

Modestly better would include the likes of Birch Bayh.

Somewhere between modestly and moderately better would be Frank Church and Jerry Brown. Church was NOT all that James Risen has cracked him up as being, but would have been better than Carter. Gov. Moonbeam might have gone less far down his California neoliberalism road and actually been a moonbeam had he been elected.

Definitely better? The person who became Carter's main challenger, and an early dropout who was better than Bernie Sanders before Bernie Sanders.

The latter first. That would have been Oklahoma Sen. Fred Harris, mounting a truly populist campaign. He wasn't a total unknown — the Hump considered him as 1968 running mate material. He was an early fighter for American Indian land rights, and was the only senator to vote against Lewis Powell's Supreme Court nomination, among other things. Coming from a border state, he might have had some of Carter's Southern appeal, while yet being pure-on Great Society. Also, going better than Church, he wanted to disband the CIA.

Harris just couldn't get enough traction, sadly.

The other? The man who, after it became clear Humphrey wouldn't seek the office, was the main rival of both Harris and Jackson (defense contractors are unionized!) — Mo Udall.

Udall, after Harris dropped out, narrowly lost the Wisconsin primary to Carter. Like older brother Stu, he was a strong environmentalist — except when it came to Arizona dams. He was also a relatively early opponent of Vietnam, openly calling for withdrawal in 1967, years after he had been elected to the House and long before LBJ officially withdrew from re-election. On labor issues, while personally strong, by voting record, he was less strong than Jackson or Harris, though better than Carter.

His main "hamstrings" were probably being a House Congresscritter rather than Senator or Governor, and coming from Aridzona before the Sunbelt explosion and thus not having high national exposure that way.

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Of side note: 1976 is the last time a Democratic nominee captured less than 50 percent of the vote in primaries and caucuses; before Trump did it in 2016, I'm not sure when it last happened on the GOP side.

For Democrats, it had happened just four years earlier. Indeed, George McGovern not only was not a majority nominee by Democratic popular votes, he wasn't even a plurality nominee, as the Hump narrowly edged him out there.

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Side note 2: Was there an "October Surprise" in 1980? Most likely. Per the Trib, per story by Ben Barnes, John Connally told an Arab leader that Iran would get a better deal from Reagan than Carter on the hostages release. Per my "conspiracy or conspiracy theory" piece, though Gary Sick hasn't nailed down the evidence, it's almost certain a Carter debate briefing book was stolen, and highly likely that Team Reagan representatives met somewhere in Europe with Iran intermediaries.