Opinion | The 1980 Kennedy-Carter split made Democrats too fearful of disunity

To understand the frenzied rush among Democratic insiders to lock down the nomination for Kamala D. Harris since President Biden stepped aside Sunday, you may need to understand how the summer of 1980 still echoes across the party’s landscape.

When I started covering Democratic politics as a magazine writer in the early 2000s, I was stunned by how often activists of a certain age would talk bitterly about the year when Ted Kennedy, then a 48-year-old senator from Massachusetts, launched a primary challenge to his party’s sitting president, Jimmy Carter. It cleaved a generation of activists who grew up to become senators and campaign managers but never for a minute forgot who was on which side of an intensely bitter civil war.

Carter prevailed, of course, but got trounced by Ronald Reagan in the general election. (My friend Jon Ward wrote an excellent book about this a few years ago, called “Camelot’s End.”) The lesson seared into Democrats — especially coming just 12 years after the conflagration in Chicago at the convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey — was that a party warring with itself was bound to lose.

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In reality, Carter would very likely have lost with or without a primary; whatever a raft of revisionist histories would have you believe, he was unpopular and overmatched, beset by an almost comical series of crises he couldn’t control. When riots are breaking out over disco records and satellites are falling randomly from the sky, people can be forgiven for wanting a little less chaos in their lives.

Even so, it became a constant, envious refrain among Democrats in the Bush years (Nos. 41 and 43) that the right was simply more orderly and hierarchical than the left and that Democrats could win only if they avoided the kind of ugly internecine combat that had doomed them in 1980.

That mythology has been handed down from one generation to the next, and you’ve heard similar sentiments in the past few days: Democrats have to come together behind Harris because Republicans are unified, and this is no time to risk some kind of drawn-out fight that ends up on the convention floor. Governors and senators, we’re told, need to put aside their own ambitions and endorse the vice president — which, by now, pretty much all of them have.

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There’s just one small problem with the unity-is-everything argument, which is that it turns out, in practice, not to be true — at least not since 1980.

Consider the Democrats who have actually won presidential elections since then. Bill Clinton came from relative obscurity to win a contested primary campaign. Barack Obama challenged the overwhelming choice of the Washington establishment, Hillary Clinton, and fought her all the way to the convention. (Although it was nowhere near as personal as 1980.) Biden wasn’t taken seriously by insiders — he finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary — until he rose from the political dead in South Carolina and suddenly looked like the only candidate who could stop Bernie Sanders.

Party discipline, meanwhile, has shown itself to be a pretty dubious campaign strategy. In 2016, Washington Democrats did their damndest to scare off serious challengers to Clinton, insisting she had it all handled, no worries. She emerged barely scathed from a primary fight with Sanders (who wasn’t even a Democrat). She turned out to be an unnatural and painfully risk-averse candidate, and we all know where that led.

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Last year, party leaders essentially did the same thing when they closed ranks behind Biden, insisting that an 81-year-old candidate with abysmal approval ratings who rarely appeared unscripted was going to be just fine. They said a competitive primary to succeed him would be a terrible idea because it would divide the party and probably lead to the nomination of Harris, who would likely lose.

So where are we now? By insisting the party unify behind Biden, Democrats pretty much ensured that his replacement, should events take a turn for the worse, would be the very candidate they worried about. And now that this is exactly what has happened, they have once again decreed that unity is paramount, time is short and the worst thing that could happen is for anyone other than Harris to get a hearing.

Harris may well be the right leader for the moment. But history and common sense would tell you (as would Obama, judging from his statement Sunday) that we will only really know for sure, one way or the other, once she has to argue the point against another serious candidate. And it’s alarming that the first candidate she will face is Donald Trump — because not even one of her potential Democratic challengers, for fear of staging a disorderly convention or otherwise disrupting the party’s collective chi, has the courage to step up and say the nomination is too important to be handed over like a merit badge.

We’ve seen enough campaigns since the Carter-Kennedy meltdown to know that unity is highly overrated. Democrats have to hope their candidate isn’t, too.

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