I kind of think supporting the Black Panthers was a sign that Hillary wasn't nowise going to go on voting Republican.
Republicans had their own far Left wing radicals back in the day. It’s long been my view that many of these left for the DNC around that time and combined with the Democrats own far Left swept into many of the functions of the party.
Carter was a sort of last push back by the old Democrat party in the face of the growing unwholesomeness that is the Left. Any administration in those years would have been more or less doomed because it was during that time that our own economy finished going through one of those capital reinvestment phases that the Keynesians dread but which led to the 1980s. Carter was further hampered somewhat by his style but mostly by the fact that he couldn’t trust people in his own party (they weren’t calling the far Left the “Never Carter” because they could hide it better back then).
After Carter couldn’t push back against the far Left the Reagan Democrats finally walked out of the party.
I think the late 70s compares in some ways to the present. With Carter the old Democrats tried to push back against the recently entrenched far Left, the Alinsky Left of which Hillary is a sample pustule. With Trump the folks sick and tired of the establishment in both parties have tried to push back. As with Carter, if Trump cannot manage to make inroads against the establishment because of the virulence of their opposition the nation will lose a vital respite from the deep state and the far Left. Worse, we’ll have no other vehicle from which to fight if the “moderate” Republicans / Never Trumpers can push us back ... just as they seem to know that if they lose they’ll no place to go now that the DNC is deep in commieland.
But where the late 70s and now are decidedly different is not just that we’re in a favorable phase in the normal economic attrition of our productive capacity, which Trump is trying to capitalize on with tariffs while our industrial base has yet to completely wither and we all trot off into the madman’s paradise of a service economy, but that the Stockholm Syndrome inflicted RNC has many who would rather lose and be liked than win and be disliked, who will run up a white flag to the real enemy so they can attack their friends rather than try to win as the Democrats never stop doing no matter what it takes.
I think the acrimony of the election in ‘16 is evidence of this, as Republicans increasingly have listened to Democrats and a media that is no longer just nakedly biased but nakedly partisan and yet many Republcans seem to want to refuse to see it.