This race reminds me of 1976, when Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to get the nomination. A lot of people didn’t want that to happen. First, there were murmuring of getting Ted Kennedy to run. The MA primary was very early that year, but stories on Chappaquiddick were being run frequently. He decided against running, though he would have accepted a draft if the convention were deadlocked (something that was thought to be more possible than it really was under the McGovern rules), after all, UNCOMMITTED won Iowa.
As Birch Bayh, Milton Shapp, Lloyd Bentsen and Fred Harris flamed out early, and Mo Udall, Scoop Jackson, George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey only picked up singletons here and there, Frank Church and Jerry Brown jumped in late, hoping to deny Carter a majority, and both won some states. Church and Brown definitely ate into each other’s base a bit. Udall nibbled from the left as well, and Jackson just ran out of money. Carter still won by a comfortable margin.
Lesson learned, that Pat Caddell figured out, was that in the revised system, early prep and momentum overcomes almost everything else. If Pat Buchanan in ‘96 were something other than a speech writer who couldn’t adjust to being a front runner, Dole would have been stopped. Even then, it took all the king’s horses, and the cooperation of second tier candidates like Phil Gramm to put the fire out.
All true, but without Watergate, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford would be minor footnotes in American history.