When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, he did something no other Democrat has been able to accomplish since: Win Texas.
Part of his victory can be chalked up to where the state was politically at the time.
"We should understand the 1976 election in Texas as part of a gradual transformation that occurred over several decades," Mark Lawrence, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, told The Texas Newsroom.
It was President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, who won Texas in both presidential elections in the 1950s. But the next decade was a different story. In the '60s it was three Democratic candidates — President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey — who won the Texas popular vote.
"But thereafter you see that the state really shifted pretty dramatically toward the Republicans," Lawrence said. "The one exception was 1976 when Jimmy Carter won by a small margin."
So, why was Carter the exception?
Lawrence cited several elements that contributed to Carter's victory here, including "Carter's stature as a white Southerner."
"I think Texas voters, like voters across the South, were inclined to give him a close look, because he looked like them, sounded like them, came from the South — which was somewhat unusual in the history of the United States after the Civil War," Lawrence said.
Natasha Altema McNeely, an associate professor of political science at University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, said Carter was also able to win because he garnered the Black and Hispanic votes in states across the South.
This post originally appeared on KUT.org from The Texas Newsroom.
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