On March 23, 1976, North Carolina Republicans celebrated
Ronald Reagan's 52% to 46% primary victory over President Ford.
Peter Wehner wrote recently for National Review Online that the Gallup Poll's findings suggest that "George W. Bush, at a comparable time in his presidency, was in marginally better shape than Barack Obama is right now."
Wehner went on to observe that "[t]his runs counter to conventional wisdom that Obama is tremendously popular, and that Bush (based on the divisive nature of the 2000 election) was not. In fact ... what President Bush did was rise in the esteem of the public during the first five weeks of his presidency, while Obama has lost a bit of altitude."
Approval ratings, even those that use language as ambiguous as Gallup and other pollsters use to make such measurements, are only snapshots of public attitude at a particular point in time. They in no way predict how popular a president will be when his presidency is finished.
Ronald Reagan, for example, who was very popular when he left office and remains a revered figure today, two decades after leaving the White House, began his presidency with a 51% approval rating. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had an approval rating of 66% a couple of weeks after taking office, and his approval rating climbed to 75% two months after his inauguration, but it slid to 31% a couple of months before Carter handed the presidency to Reagan in 1981.
That brings me to a "what-if" from history that I've been pondering today. One-third of a century ago, in March 1976, Ronald Reagan came to North Carolina after losing all five Republican primaries that had been held to that point — and the most recent setback had been by 59% to 40% in Illinois, the state where Reagan was born. Reagan's campaign was nearly out of money, and the general feeling was that, if he could not pull off a victory in North Carolina, he would have no choice but to withdraw.
Reagan himself rejected any suggestion that he would withdraw if he failed to win in North Carolina. As Jules Witcover reported in his book "Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976," Reagan told adviser Lyn Nofziger prior to the primary, "I'm not going to get out of this thing. I'm going to win this. I'm in this all the way."
No one will ever know what Reagan might have done if he had been handed a sixth straight primary defeat. With the help of Sen. Jesse Helms, Reagan rebounded. He won the North Carolina primary and started winning other primaries as well. Instead of having the luxury of time to prepare for the fall campaign, President Ford fought Reagan through the rest of the primaries and went to the Republican convention in Kansas City that summer with the nomination still up in the air.
Reagan only failed to win the nomination by 60 votes. He won many of the primaries that came after North Carolina — including California, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Nevada and Montana — and narrowly lost in Tennessee, Oregon and Kentucky.
What would have happened if Reagan had won a few more delegates and taken the nomination from Ford? Would he have defeated Carter that November? If so, would he have been overwhelmed by the economy and the Islamic Revolution, paving the way for Carter — or perhaps Ted Kennedy or Walter Mondale or Jerry Brown or another Democrat — to capture the White House in 1980?
And what if Ford had won North Carolina? Would Reagan have withdrawn shortly thereafter, with money continuing to dwindle and fewer and fewer contributors willing to donate money to an obviously losing cause? Would that have given Ford the momentum he needed to successfully challenge Carter in the fall? And would it have meant the end of Reagan's presidential ambitions?
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