To describe the current incumbent's predicament, substitute Trump's botched coronavirus response for Carter's inability to free American hostages seized by Iran. Then look at the numbers.
Today, Trump's national polling deficit of around 10 percentage points matches Carter's popular vote deficit against Ronald Reagan -- who won a 44-state landslide while fellow Republicans seized control of the Senate.
View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling
Yet, just over a week from Election Day, few political analysts are prepared to say that points toward overwhelming defeat for Trump and his party on November 3, for three reasons.
Trump's base keeps him afloat
The first is the sturdiness of the narrow Trump political base, centered on less-educated, rural, evangelical and blue-collar Whites.
Elected in 2016 with just 46.1% of the vote, the President has remained unpopular overall throughout his term. But despite the pandemic, economic downtown, racial unrest, and Trump's erratic and provocative behavior, his loyal supporters have kept his job approval from dipping much below the 42.5% floor of late last week in the fivethirtyeight.com polling average.
"Trump is the worst President ever -- I can't imagine historians will spend more than 10 minutes debating that," says Larry Sabato, who directs the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. But "he really has developed a rock-solid base."
That's largely because present-day polarization has left the GOP far more ideologically homogenous than Carter-era Democrats were.
Vestigial Democratic ties in the nation's most conservative region helped the former Georgia governor sweep the South in his 1976 victory. His troubled tenure collapsed that conservative support, cutting his first-year job approval of 75% in half by the fall of 1980. Carter ended up slightly outpacing his job approval to draw 41% of the popular vote.
Polarization and demographics
The second reason: the combination of polarization and demographic change has left individual states more politically distinct from one another.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the barest of electoral victories while losing the popular vote to Al Gore by half a percentage point. In 2016, Trump captured a larger share of electoral votes while suffering a larger two-point defeat in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
This year, the contours of individual battlegrounds mean Trump would have a fighting chance for re-election even if he loses the popular vote by twice that much. The 2018 mid-term elections, when antipathy toward Trump and his policies gave Democrats a clear overall edge, proved the point.
Democrats surged nationally to recapture control of the House. But they fell short in some critical battleground races for governor and Senate.
"Even an eight-point national lead wasn't enough for Democrats to flip Ohio or Iowa," notes Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report. "It wasn't enough to hold onto Florida."
Today Trump runs significantly better in the electorally decisive states than he does nationally. The d
