The 1976 Kansas City Convention and the Last Real Fight Over the Nomination

The most remembered speech at the 1976 Republican convention was given by a man who had just lost.

Think about how strange that is. The president of the United States had spent a year and a half fighting off a challenger from his own party. He won the roll call in a packed hall in Kansas City. He gave an acceptance speech that, by every account, was one of the best of his career. And then, to the surprise of nearly everyone in the arena, he turned and invited the loser to come down and say a few words. What followed is what the delegates talked about on the way home, and what Republicans were still talking about four years later.

Folks, that is a pretty good summary of a party in the middle of a transition. The nomination went one way. The future of the party went another. And all of it was decided in a hall where, for the last time in the modern era, nobody knew on the first morning who the nominee would be. Let me walk you through how we got there.

The president nobody elected

Start with the awkward fact about Gerald Ford. He was never on a national ticket. In October 1973 President Nixon nominated him Vice President under the 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned, Congress confirmed him, and when Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Ford became the only president in American history to hold the office without having been elected to either of the top two jobs. If you want the full story of that handoff, see Watergate Day by Day and the Republicans Who Told Nixon It Was Over.

He then pardoned Nixon a month later, which hurt him with voters of all kinds, as we explain in Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and paid for it at the ballot box. He chose Nelson Rockefeller, the former governor of New York, as his Vice President, which pleased the party's moderate wing and alarmed its conservative wing. And he was governing with a Congress controlled by Democrats and an economy that had been bruised by inflation, a recession and an oil shock.

Into that opening stepped Ronald Reagan. He had finished two terms as governor of California in January 1975. He had made a late run at the 1968 nomination, and he had spent the 1970s on the radio and the speaking circuit, preaching the conservative case that he had first made on national television in 1964, a speech we cover in The 1964 television speech that turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative leader. In November 1975 he announced that he would challenge a sitting president of his own party. That is rare. Presidents are usually renominated by acclamation, and the party takes a dim view of anyone who tries to change that.

What the challenge was about

It would be easy to remember this as a fight over personalities. It was a fight over direction. Reagan's complaints, broadly, were these:

1. Détente. Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, pursued a policy of easing tensions with the Soviet Union through arms limitation agreements and trade. Reagan argued that it traded away American strength for promises.
2. The Panama Canal. Reagan made the negotiations over the canal a rallying cry in the later primaries, arguing that the United States should not give away what it had built and paid for.
3. The size of government. Reagan argued that Washington could be made smaller and that power should flow back to the states, an idea he had tested as governor.
4. Who speaks for the party. Reagan's supporters believed the party's establishment treated conservatives as a voting bloc to be thanked and ignored.

Ford's side had its own case. He was the incumbent. He had calmed the country after Watergate. He could point to a record of fiscal restraint, including vetoes of spending bills. And his supporters said, reasonably, that the party's job in November was to beat a Democrat, not to settle an ideological score against its own president.

Ford tries to steady the right

Ford was not deaf to the complaint. In early November 1975, about the time Reagan was announcing, the president reshuffled his administration in a shake-up the press promptly nicknamed the Halloween Massacre. Donald Rumsfeld went to the Pentagon, George H. W. Bush went to the CIA, Dick Cheney became White House chief of staff, and Kissinger gave up his second job as national security adviser. At almost the same time, Rockefeller let it be known that he would not seek a place on the 1976 ticket.

Read that as a conservative would. It was a concession, and a quiet one. A president does not rearrange the furniture and drop his own Vice President from the next ticket unless he believes the challenge from the right is serious. It is also the standard pattern of a primary challenge: even a challenger who loses pulls the incumbent toward his positions long before the voting is over. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you primary challenges only hurt the party.

The primaries: a seesaw

The fight was close from the start. Ford narrowly beat Reagan in the New Hampshire primary in February 1976. He won Florida in March and Illinois a week later. Reagan lost the first several contests, and many people said he should drop out.

Then came North Carolina, on March 23, where Reagan won. It changed the race. It showed that a conservative challenger could beat a sitting president in a southern state, and it gave Reagan's money-starved campaign the oxygen to keep going. He went on to sweep Texas in May and win in Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, Nebraska and elsewhere, while Ford won in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, New Jersey and other states.

When the primaries ended in June, neither man had a majority of the delegates. Neither man was close enough to claim the nomination outright. The prize would be decided in a smaller group of uncommitted delegates and in the maneuvering that surrounded them. That is how a convention is supposed to work, and in the modern era it happens almost never. If you want the whole story of how the party moved from bosses to primaries, read How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses. The point for now is that in 1976 the process had not yet become a formality.

The Schweiker gambit

On July 26, a few weeks before the convention, Reagan did something no major candidate had done in modern times. He announced who his running mate would be before he had won the nomination: Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania.

The idea was clever. Schweiker was well regarded among moderates and labor, and Pennsylvania had a large delegation. Reagan hoped to reassure uncommitted delegates that he could broaden his appeal beyond the conservative base, and to draw some Pennsylvania delegates toward him.

It did not work out. Many conservatives were baffled that Reagan, the movement's hero, had named a running mate with a more liberal voting record. Some Southern delegations that had been leaning toward him began to wobble. Delegations that had been leaning toward him, Mississippi's among them, were rattled. The pick may have made Reagan look as though he was bargaining, and the Ford forces made sure that delegates heard it that way. Here, for the record, is the lesson I draw from the Schweiker gambit: surprising your own side with a move is rarely worth the risk, even if the move is clever on paper.

The rules fight

The Reagan camp's second move was a proposed convention rule, known as Rule 16-C, that would have required any presidential candidate to name a running mate before the balloting began. The idea was to force Ford to make his choice public and, perhaps, to put him in a spot where he would have to name someone unpopular with some delegates.

The Ford forces beat it on the floor. That vote is the real hinge of the convention, because the delegates who voted on it were mostly the same delegates who voted on the nomination. Once Reagan lost the rules fight, the nomination was close to out of reach, and everyone in the hall knew it. The principle is worth remembering. At a convention, procedure is power. The side that wins the rules usually wins the nomination, and the delegates who understand that are the ones who win.

The roll call

On the night of August 18, in Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, the delegates voted. A majority of the 2,259 delegates was 1,130. The result:

• Gerald Ford: 1,187
• Ronald Reagan: 1,070
• Elliot Richardson: 1

Do the subtraction, since the arithmetic is the whole story. Ford's 1,187 minus the 1,130 he needed leaves a cushion of 57. Reagan would have needed to flip 57 delegates to reverse the outcome of the nomination. A few dozen people, out of more than two thousand, were the difference between the two men. (Check the math: 1,187 plus 1,070 plus 1 is 2,258, so one delegate did not vote.)

That is not a large margin, and it is as close as a convention has come in modern times. It is why 1976 is called the last real fight. Since then, the primaries have produced a nominee before the party gathers.

The platform and the speech

If you think the Reagan side left with nothing, you have not read the platform. His delegates had a strong presence on the platform committee, and the convention adopted a plank called "Morality in Foreign Policy," which many read as a rebuke of the Ford-Kissinger approach to the Soviet Union. Ford's own team accepted it rather than fight. It was a sign that the party's ideas were drifting toward Reagan even as its nominee was not.

Then came Ford's acceptance speech on August 19. He named Senator Bob Dole of Kansas as his running mate, taking the place Rockefeller had already said he would not seek, a change that tells you how much the conservative wing had flexed its muscles. The speech was well received. And at its end Ford did what presidents do not do: he asked Reagan to join him on the platform.

Reagan came down and spoke without a script, for a few minutes. He said he had been thinking about a letter he had been asked to write for a time capsule to be opened a hundred years later, and he asked the delegates to think about what the people of that future would say about the choices Americans made in 1976. He talked about the threat of nuclear war and about the importance of the nation's ideals. He did not say that the party had picked the wrong man. He did not need to. Accounts of the night say that by the end some delegates were wondering aloud whether the party had nominated the wrong man.

Some historians question how much of the speech's reputation was built after the fact, since Reagan became president four years later and memory can flatter. That is a fair caution. But the contemporary accounts agree that the delegates were moved, and that the speech set the stage for 1980. A leader who loses a nomination gracefully and in a way that reunites the party has done more for his future than one who wins sullenly.

What happened in November

Ford lost. Jimmy Carter beat him by about two points in the popular vote and carried 297 electoral votes to Ford's 240. The result was close: Ohio, for one, was decided by a fraction of a point. Many conservatives, then and since, argued that the divisions left over from the primary fight had cost the ticket enthusiasm in the West and the South. Ford's supporters answered that Watergate, the pardon and the economy had already left him a long way behind in the summer, and that he nearly closed the gap.

Both claims can be partly true. What is not in dispute is how it ended. Four years later the party nominated Reagan, and the movement that had lost in Kansas City had the White House.

What it teaches a Republican today

Here are four lessons I'd take from Kansas City.

1. A real fight is healthy if it ends in a united party. Ford and Reagan disagreed deeply, and both spoke at the convention's close. Compare that to the parties that split in Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912 and lost.
2. Rules are strategy. If your side wants to change the party, learn the rules. The county convention is where it starts, which is why we wrote how to write and pass a platform resolution at your county convention.
3. Primary voters set the direction even when they do not choose the nominee. Reagan won enough primaries to move the platform, and that did as much for his future as a narrow victory would have done.
4. Incumbents are not unbeatable. A challenger from within the party nearly took down a sitting president. The party should expect that and allow it, not punish it.

The bottom line

• The 1976 convention was the last time the Republican nomination was truly in doubt when the delegates arrived, and it came down to a margin of 57 delegates over a majority.
• Reagan lost the nomination and won the argument: the platform moved his way, and his closing speech made him the front-runner for 1980.
• If you want to move the party, show up where the rules are written, from the precinct meeting to the county convention.
• Fight hard inside the family, and then come together before November. The party that cannot do the second part gives away the election.
• Read the 1976 platform yourself. It is public, and it shows how much of what we call the modern conservative agenda was already on the page.