Jimmy Carter + Indiana: A love story

How the former president's campaign and life intersected with the Hoosier state.

The Jimmy Carter Smiling Peanut, donated by the Indiana Democratic Party, off Route 45 outside of Plains, Ga.

At first blush, Jimmy Carter had a contentious relationship with Indiana.

The 98-year-old 39th president, now in hospice care in his native Plains, Ga., lost here to Republican Gerald Ford by more than 7 points in 1976.

Carter also stymied one of the most gifted politicians ever to come out of the Hoosier state: Birch Bayh.

In the lead-up to 1976, Bayh, the late lion of the Senate, author of the 25th Amendment and the 26th Amendment, and father of Title IX, enjoyed the frontrunner’s aura in the Democratic primary. Bayh contrasted himself with Carter’s outsider status: “Well, I’m Birch Bayh, and I’m a politician,” he said, in what Jonathan Alter described in his seminal Carter biography, His Very Best, as “a famously unpersuasive ad.”

Once, as Carter campaigned in Indiana, the Hoosier Democratic Sen. Vance Hartke showed up at an event, according to Alter’s biography, upsetting Carter and reinforcing his image as a member of the establishment.

“If I ever see that son of a bitch again at one of my rallies,” Carter told press secretary Jody Powell, according to Alter’s account, “you can be his press secretary.”

In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, Bayh lamented Carter’s insurgent status.

“No matter where I go in this state,” Bayh said a month before the caucuses, “that goddamned Jimmy Carter has been there four times before me.”

But if Carter had a rocky start with the state, Hoosier Democrats would ultimately come around on the peanut farmer—in ways that have become forever etched in Indiana political history. Indiana Democrats quickly got on board with his campaign, donating the 13-foot Smiling Peanut statue to Plains. Here’s the New York Times on the novelty figure:

I couldn't help but grin back at the 13-foot-high oddity and campaign symbol bestowed by Democratic friends from Indiana. Near a little convenience store, the weatherized peanut -- with a huge, Carter-like grin --is made of wooden hoops, chicken wire, aluminum foil and polyurethane.

Meanwhile, a then-young politico named Hillary Clinton had moved to Indianapolis to work for Carter as his field coordinator, further endearing Hoosier Democrats who were taken with his attention to the state.

In his book Hillary Rodham Clinton, biographer Donnie Radcliffe writes:

Indiana Democrats had been flabbergasted that Carter had bothered to send a team at all, particularly since he was expected to capture the solid South and needed only to split eight critical swing states, of which Indiana was not one. “It was the first time since Lyndon Johnson that a Democratic presidential candidate made any kind of an effort,” said William Geigreich, who knew all about unsuccessful runs by Democrats in Indiana and at the time was working on Conrad’s race. But Carter was also aware that a number of Indianans in the southern part of the state had ties to Kentucky and Tennessee, and where there were Southerners, there was hope.

I asked the University of Notre Dame Professor Emeritus Robert Schmuhl—father of current Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Mike Schmuhl, what he remembered of Carter after attending an Evansville rally.

“There was an enthusiasm in Evansville that didn't just come from having a presidential candidate visit southern Indiana to campaign,” the elder Schmuhl said. (Schmuhl’s son, of course, would go on to manage Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign).

“At the time Jimmy Carter was a fresh, new face in American politics and that was enormously appealing after the years of Johnson, Nixon and Ford,” the elder Schmuhl continued. “He was different, and his peanut-farming past provided an added dimension to his biography. It was impossible to avoid signs or banners or campaign items that played off the peanut peg one way or another. The celebrated statue is an example of what you saw across the country back then. Remember: Indiana had two Democratic senators when Carter came to Evansville, and he probably thought he had a chance of picking up the state, despite Ford being from Michigan.” 

At his September 1976 event in Evansville, Carter praised the Hoosier people.

“I'm glad to be back in Indiana,” Carter said. “The state that expressed your confidence in me in the primary, gave me a great victory, and one that I believe is going to give me another great victory on November.”

But Bayh wouldn’t be the only Indiana candidate associated with Carter.

Pete Buttigieg—and his 2020 presidential campaign—long sought Carter’s sunny Iowa mantle, blanketing the state with stops as Carter did. Both served in the Navy and sought to position themselves as outsider candidates.

In her memoir Any Given Tuesday, Buttigieg’s senior adviser Lis Smith writes that she had arranged a meeting between the Carters and the Buttigiegses after the South Carolina primary to “signal that we were in the race to stay.”

But Carter had some words of wisdom for Buttigieg.

Smith and Buttigieg walking in Plains, Ga. Courtesy of Chuck Kennedy/PFA.

“You’ve had an amazing run,” Carter told him, as Smith recounts, “but you know it’s over now.”

When we stopped at the Plains railroad tracks, I choked up as I asked Pete if he’d ever imagined—way back when we first met—that we’d find ourselves here in Plains, Georgia, after he’d won Iowa and come a close second in New Hampshire. He admitted that he hadn’t, but that he had no regrets. Then he thanked me for believing in him.

Buttigieg began the last day of his campaign in Plains before jetting back to South Bend to announce he was suspending his campaign that night.

In the end, Carter would dispatch not one but two Indiana politicians from Democratic presidential primaries—even as he managed to foster a lasting affection from Hoosier Democrats.