Former President Jimmy Carter’s announcement that he was entering hospice care has renewed interest in his come-out-of-nowhere, “Jimmy who?” campaign for president. In this, Maine played an often overlooked role in 1976 as a launching pad for his candidacy.

Carter’s win in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary in late February of that year is typically seen as the turning point by which Carter achieved front-runner status. But it was Carter’s win in Maine in early February by which he gained crucial traction.

Jimmy Carter in Portland on Feb. 1, 1976, the night he won the Maine Democratic caucus for president. Contributed photo

The Jan. 29 Mississippi caucuses, three days before the kickoff of Maine’s, was one Carter had been counting on to demonstrate his strength, especially among fellow Southerners. Instead, the state supported Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who seized a resounding win over the former Georgia governor, 44% to 14%.

The setback in Mississippi made Maine all the more critical as a tee up to New Hampshire.

A key figure in Carter’s landmark performance in Maine was University of Maine Law School Prof. Martin “Marty” Rogoff. Though Carter’s profile in Maine had been enhanced by the endorsement of former Gov. Kenneth Curtis, and though Portland’s Ed Kearney was also a major early force, it was Rogoff who was the state’s foremost on-the-ground leader. In interview with this columnist in 2008, Rogoff, who has in the last generation cemented a reputation as a prominent international law academic, explained how he came to support the future 39th president.

“In the summer of 1975 Jimmy Carter came in to Maine and I had the opportunity to talk with him for about one hour,” he said. “We met at a conference room in the Portland Jetport and was impressed by him in terms of his response to questions, his ideas, his intelligence.”

But it was more than Carter’s ideology the led Rogoff to enlist as his lieutenant in Maine. The pragmatic desire to win for the Democrats, who were facing the challenge of trying to defeat President Gerald Ford, also came into play. After all, not since FDR defeated Herbert Hoover in the depths of the Depression in 1932 had the country ousted a sitting incumbent president.

“I am also a partisan Democrat and was very interested in the Democrats winning the White House,” Rogoff said. “I thought given the electoral lay of the land at that time it was really necessary for sort of a moderate southerner to be the Democratic candidate.

“There were people like Morris Udall and others who were potential candidates but it just seemed to me that in terms of electability Jimmy Carter had the better profile.”

The caucus win in Maine in which Rogoff played a leading role also influenced the New Hampshire outcome by the strategic media presence of southern Maine TV stations in our state’s only American neighbor.

After Carter’s nomination in July, Rogoff became the official state coordinator of the Carter campaign in Maine. But Rogoff had more than a mere regional influence on the former Georgia governor’s presentation.

“If you remember in the beginning of the general election campaign Carter was shown usually in a sort of a denim shirt down in the peanut field shaking a peanut bush,” Rogoff said in our interview.

That wouldn’t last. At an October meeting with Carter’s campaign hierarchy in Boston, Rogoff and his fellow New England coordinators successfully prevailed on the higher ups to have him wear a suit and tie more often so as to appear more presidential..

The general election that followed bore out the validity of Rogoff’s initial assessment, namely, that it would take a candidate with southern roots to win back the White House. In one of the closest elections up that point in American history, Carter’s 297-to-240 Electoral College win was achieved only by a sweep of the normally Republican South while present-day Democratic mainstays such as California and Illinois voted for Ford.

And Maine? It was one of his best states in New England, with Carter losing by less than a single percentage point, a showing that was far stronger than in neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont, which Ford carried by 11 percentage points.

As for the Carter presidency, itself Rogoff says Carter’s emphasis on human rights deserves more credit than any for the fall of the Soviet regime that occurred in the decade following his single term in office.

“Because the opposition to the Soviet rule in Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern European countries really took the form of human rights activism and he did a lot to stir that up so I think that had as much to do or even more than what Reagan did,” Rogoff said.

As we now take time to observe the character and accomplishments of our longest-lived former president, we should also remember the role that Rogoff and Maine played in lifting him from the path of obscurity and landing him on the road to the White House.

Paul Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his history and analyses on public affairs in Maine. He can be reached at: pmills@myfairpoint.net