President Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy had been sharp adversaries with a bad history, and in the 1980 presidential campaign, they let it bleed into a bitter nomination fight.
The Carter administration challenged Kennedy's patriotism and refused to debate, while Kennedy dragged out their fight for nine months, all the way to the Democratic convention. A weakened Carter prevailed and won the nomination, but he went on to lose to Ronald Reagan in November.
Convention fights often spell ruin for a party. The 1980 experience for Democrats – as well as a fight in 1968, and one in 1976 for Republicans – all suggest that a bruising primary carried through the summer can contribute to defeat in November.
Today, nervous Democrats are worried that history will repeat itself as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lags in delegates and the popular vote, has refused to concede the nomination to Sen. Barack Obama.
For all the sirens warning of disaster, history offers mixed guidance on whether spirited primary fights are fatal. Many historians and analysts say that while protracted primaries can weaken a nominee, bigger factors are usually at play. Voters are often swayed by whether they feel the country is headed in the right direction. They take into account whether primary battles are personal or political. They want to see whether the winner and the loser can patch things up. And time can make a difference.
No one, however, really knows whether this year's nominee will be too damaged to fend off Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in what polls suggest will be a strong year for Democrats.
“There are interesting patterns of convention fights weakening the parties going into the election,” said Ted Widmer, a presidential historian at Brown University. “But I don't think that's going to happen this year. All the issues favor the Democrats. There's a wobbly economy, the war in Iraq and huge numbers of Democrats are ready to go vote for anyone but the Republican nominee. It would take considerable effort by the Democratic Party to lose this election.”
In the case of Carter, many analysts say he would have lost anyway, even without a primary fight. The economy was mired in “stagflation,” Americans were held hostage in Iran and his approval ratings were in the low 30s. A primary challenge was almost inevitable, and an independent, John Anderson, was also drawn into the race.
If that wasn't enough, he faced Reagan, a candidate widely considered to be one of the best political communicators in modern times.
Still, it could not have helped Carter that a prominent member of his own party took him on, or that Kennedy left the 1980 convention with a defiant vow that “the dream shall never die.”
Some Democrats fear the current race will spiral downward for months, leaving a dispirited party.
“This contest will get even more contentious, and there will be more charges and countercharges,” said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's campaign in 2000 and is neutral in this year's race.
“People were excited; now they're exhausted,” Brazile said. “In the beginning, they liked one candidate and respected the other; now they love one and hate the other.”
Some, particularly Clinton supporters, contend that such concern is overblown.
“There is somehow the suggestion that because we are having a vigorous debate about who would be the best president, we are going to weaken this party in the fall,” former President Clinton told the California Democratic Party convention Sunday in San Jose. “Chill out.”
A Gallup poll last week found that as of March, 28 percent of Clinton backers would vote for McCain over Obama, and 19 percent of Obama supporters would vote for McCain over Clinton.
But in the Republican primary in 2000, more than half of those who originally supported McCain said they would vote for Gore over George W. Bush in the fall, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. By November, about 30 percent of those potential defectors had returned to the party fold, said Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at American University.
That year, Bush had seven months to unite his party. If the Democrats fight through their convention, in late August, they would have two months.
“The earlier they wrap it up, the more likely they are to bring people back into the party for the fall,” Schaffner said. “But I don't think you'll see as many defections as in 2000 because we're more polarized than we were in 2000. In 2000, a quarter of the public said they didn't care who won. More people care now, they see major differences between the parties.”
A study by the University of New Mexico in 1998 found that a divisive presidential primary could have a “marginal or even nonexistent effect” on the outcome in November.
Choosing a foe from the primary as a running mate, as Reagan did with George H.W. Bush in 1980, can help, as can a reconciliation.
In 1952, after Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Taft battled for the Republican nomination – with Taft's campaign convinced that Eisenhower forces had “stolen” the nomination – the two mapped out a fall strategy with a clear role for Taft. Eisenhower went on to win the White House.
But some fights are ruinous. Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cited 1968 as the “prime example” of a primary battle that seriously damaged the Democrats and their nominee, Hubert Humphrey.
In the months preceding the convention, assassins killed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. During the convention, war protesters and Chicago police clashed.
“There you had a bruising fight that became so contentious that it split the convention in two with violence, as well as internal dissension,” Goodwin said. Republican Richard Nixon's “victory was helped very much by that split in the party.”
Republicans had problems in 1964. The relationship between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller was so antagonistic that Rockefeller was booed off the convention stage. Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who took over the presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy, went on to beat Goldwater in a landslide.
Another disastrous year for the Republicans was 1976, when Reagan challenged the incumbent, President Ford. Ford later said that Reagan's failure to campaign vigorously for him in the fall was partly responsible for his loss to Carter. Yet Ford was also weakened by a sour economy, the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's resignation and Ford's subsequent pardon of Nixon.
While intraparty squabbles can toughen a candidate, they can also provide ammunition for the other side.
“The Republicans are not asleep,” said Paul Kirk, who was chairman of the Democratic Party from 1985 to 1989 and Kennedy's political director in 1980. “They'll use all that stuff for cannon fodder.”
2008 VOTE: PRESIDENT