Remembering Jimmy Carter, last Democrat to win presidential race in Texas

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Texans who worked with Jimmy Carter remembered him as a principled and compassionate leader — the last Democrat to win the state in a presidential election. Carter died Sunday afternoon at his Georgia home at age 100.

The peanut farmer turned politician was praised for philanthropic efforts that continued well into his ninth decade after a single-term presidency that began with his 1976 defeat of Republican President Gerald Ford.

“He’s exactly the kind of human being that needs to be president,” John Pouland, Carter’s state coordinator for the 1976 Democratic primary, said soon after learning that Carter would receive hospice care. “He lived the life that he felt was the right way to live as a Christian.”

Born and raised in Plains, Georgia, Carter actively served in the Navy for eight years before returning to his home state to take over the family’s peanut-growing business after his father’s death in 1953.

Carter went on to serve in the Georgia Senate and as governor before winning the 1976 presidential election. Texas’ 26 electoral votes helped put Carter over the top, a victory he couldn’t repeat in his landslide loss to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Carter became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Brownsville during a campaign stop in the closing days of the 1980 election season.

He praised the area’s farmland, viewed during a low-altitude plane trip from Houston; extolled his record on education; and boasted about appointing more than 200 Hispanic Americans to senior positions, “more than any other previous administration in history.”

With the polls pointing toward defeat, his speech in Brownsville also veered into the philosophical, with Carter speaking about the burden of making “the final judgment in the loneliness of the Oval Office.”

“Sometimes it has been a lonely job, but with the involvement of the American people, it’s also a gratifying job,” he said in the Nov. 1, 1980, speech.

He ended up losing Texas by nearly 14 percentage points, starting a losing streak for Democratic nominees that has lasted through the next 10 presidential elections.

A pair of Texans may have played a part in that defeat. In 1980, former Texas Gov. John B. Connally Jr., ran for the Republican nomination to challenge Carter. When Connally lost, he threw his support behind GOP nominee Ronald Reagan.

That summer, Connally and former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes took a trip to the Middle East, meeting with heads of state in various capitals. In the midst of the campaign, the Carter administration was embroiled in the Iranian Hostage Crisis, in which 52 Americans were held captive in Iran. Nightly news of the crisis strained Carter’s support and left him vulnerable to charges of ineptitude. During the trip, according to Barnes, Connally told the Middle Eastern leaders to deliver a message to Iran that Reagan would give them a better deal if they waited to release the hostages until after the election.

Barnes kept silent about the trip for decades, only revealing it to the New York Times in March after it was announced that Carter had entered hospice care. Connally died in 1993.

Connally told an Arab leader in their first meeting, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Barnes told the Times. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”

Former Carter aides have speculated that they might have won if they had returned the hostages before the election. The 52 Americans were released on the day Reagan took office.

Texans were introduced to Carter in the 1976 Democratic primary, when he faced U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a politically established Texan.

“The ‘Jimmy who?’ line was not made up,” Pouland said. “We probably heard that refrain more than anything.”

Carter defeated Bentsen — the Georgian was established as the party’s standard bearer by the time Texas held its primary — and Pouland attributed Carter’s success to his Navy service and Christian values, characteristics that appealed to Texas voters.

At the time, Texas was at the tail end of a century-long, post-Civil War era of domination by Democrats in state politics. There were 133 Democrats in the 150-member state House, and 28 in the 31-member state Senate. The most significant political divides were among liberal and conservative Democrats, not Democrats and Republicans. But in presidential politics, Republicans had made inroads. Richard Nixon had won the state by 33 percentage points four years earlier, breaking a streak for three straight Democratic victories. Carter won the state with 51% of the vote.

But the state was changing fast as conservatives flocked to the GOP. The state elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements, two years after Carter was elected. Pouland said Carter served as a model for attracting moderate Southern Democrats, something former President Bill Clinton tried but failed to replicate.

Garry Mauro, a former Texas land commissioner who worked for Carter’s 1976 presidential bid, remembered the candidate as genuine and earnest.

Mauro said it never occurred to Carter to filter people out, and he didn’t restrict access to himself even as his campaign built momentum. Mauro recalled numerous occasions when he dialed a campaign number, only to have the candidate’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, answer the phone.

“He really was the people’s president,” Mauro said.

Carter’s influence on Texas Democrats was immense, reshaping the state party’s power base to accommodate new faces on his team, Mauro said.

“Jimmy Carter empowered a whole new generation of leadership in Texas,” Mauro said.

His many years in politics did not change Carter’s altruistic outlook, Pouland added, and Carter took an active role in advancing human rights through his nonprofit organization, the Carter Center, after leaving office.

Carter, Pouland said, “went to his same church, worked on his same farm, kept his same friends and continued to live his life as an example for the very thing that he was an advocate of, and that was compassion.”

Though Carter was the last Democrat presidential candidate to win Texas, his legacy is still evident in the party, said state Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas.

“He was committed to human rights and gave Democrats the confidence to be for human rights and for peace and for honesty in government,” said Bryant, who served as Carter’s campaign manager in Dallas County during Carter’s first presidential campaign.

Bryant points to Carter’s post-presidential years as some of his most impactful.

“Instead of serving on corporate boards, or making big speaking fees, or playing golf, he was going to Habitat for Humanity. He was at the [Carter Center]. And he wrote 30 books, the proceeds of which went to nonprofits,” Bryant said, adding that Carter was “just a great example for how to live a life devoted to the public interest.

“He lived his faith. He practiced what he preached,” Bryant said. “That’s very important for the country to see that.”

In August 2007, Carter joined South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu in calling Texas to stop the execution of Kenneth Foster, an inmate who was on death row for acting as the getaway driver during a killing. Then-Gov. Rick Perry commuted Foster’s sentence to life in prison hours before the execution was scheduled.

After the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, Carter joined four other former presidents — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton and George H.W. Bush — in appealing for donations to help in the recovery. The effort raised more than $41 million in response to the costliest natural disaster of 2017, when extreme flooding in Houston and the surrounding area caused more than $125 billion in damage.

Carter maintained his commitment to service through his life, helping to build and repair Dallas homes for Habitat for Humanity as a 90-year-old in 2014.

“No matter what your faith may be, we are taught to share what we have with poor people,” he told The Dallas Morning News at the time. “It’s very difficult to cross that divide between people that have everything and people that have never had a decent house. Habitat makes it easy to cross that line.”