Democratic Blowout In 1976

[Zyobot]

With Watergate costing President Nixon his once-high approval ratings and bruising the GOP in the midterms, 1976 seemed like it'd be a comeback election for the Democrats. Giving the nod to dark-horse candidate Jimmy Carter, they won back the White House in November, with 297 electoral votes and 50.1% of the popular vote. A clear victory, but nothing like the especially lopsided polling seen in the months before Election Night, with Carter once peaking at 62%.

So, is there any conceivable way to make 1976 a blowout year for the Democrats, perhaps even similar in extent to the GOP landslide achieved four years before? Carter's massive spike in support being a one-off and his OTL victory being quite modest, it doesn't necessarily have to be him who becomes the Democratic nominee ITTL. Nonetheless, I'd think that Nixon doubling down and refusing to resign when confronted with all sorts of evidence that he was complicit in Watergate would doom the GOP's chances, pretty much regardless of who the Democrats nominated.

Here's a map simulator, for those interested in more visual projections as to how this scenario might go.

Thank you in advance,

Zyobot

[american2006]

It’s possible but not probable. The best way would be Spiro Agnew has his scandal but doesn’t resign. I could see this being a blowout but democrats would still have issues breaking 400 EVs.

[Zyobot]

Jul 7, 2021 4:59:31 GMT american2006 said:

It’s possible but not probable. The best way would be Spiro Agnew has his scandal but doesn’t resign. I could see this being a blowout but democrats would still have issues breaking 400 EVs.

So, he becomes President instead of Ford and continues to maintain his innocence, despite all the evidence screaming otherwise?

If I remember correctly, Ford was barely implicated in Watergate when he ran IOTL, and still lost (even if it was narrowly). Agnew, on the other hand, was clearly implicated in tax evasion. Maybe it affects the typical American’s life much less than Watergate did, but I imagine it’d be easier for Democrats to hit him on personal integrity and restoring transparency. Whether it’d be Carter or someone else who clinches the Democratic nomination, due to the butterflies involved, I don’t know.

[Zyobot]

Not sure how plausible it is given that it's algorithm known to have errors, but having played The Campaign Trail game just now, I won 499 electoral votes and 54.1% of the popular vote playing as Carter, crushing Ford in an FDR-esque landslide.

Do we foresee any circumstances in which the Democratic nominee, be it Carter or otherwise, could win by similarly massive margins? Certainly, this scenario was predicated on Carter reliably giving the "right answers", which is hard to consistently do when you're on the campaign trail for months or years, and have such a large coalition of people whose desires you need to cater to (not to mention the aforementioned algorithmic flaws in the system itself). As such, I wouldn't really consider the simulator hard evidence of a Democratic blowout being possible, though I also hope it demonstrates what I'm looking for more concretely.