It is striking how many of the speeches at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions used language to appeal to “average working folks.” Both of the presidential candidates, as well as their vice presidential nominees, positioned themselves as typical, everyday Americans (when this is, of course, not the case for any of them).

I was reminded of Jimmy Carter’s campaign for office in 1976.  Elected governor of Georgia in 1970, Carter was relatively unknown when he ran for president six years later. He played up his Baptist upbringing and background as a peanut farmer to position himself as an outsider, a plainspoken southerner from Plains, Georgia. In fact, Carter was a naval officer with graduate training in nuclear physics; he took over the family farming business when his father passed away in 1953. But the image of a simple “man of the people” had a lot of appeal to an American public wracked by the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and double-digit inflation.

Carter’s 1976 acceptance speech presents some interesting points of comparison to those we recently heard at this year’s conventions. An unpopular war factored into both election years, as did a weak economy and inflation concerns, particularly worries about energy shortages and rising fuel prices. One important difference was that Carter’s Republican opponent, Gerald Ford, was the incumbent, having assumed the office after Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. Nonetheless, both Ford and John McCain faced the challenge of distancing themselves from an unpopular administration with whom they might be associated. Interestingly enough, both McCain and Ford downplayed partisan affiliations in their respective speeches and instead focused on uniting the nation under an American identity.

Carter’s speech uses many of the themes that we heard recently: hope, unity, and, most importantly, the need for government to get back in touch with “the people.” Invoking his past as a “farm boy,” the Democratic Party’s history of embracing “sweatshops” and “dark mills,” and the need to fight against “a political economic elite,” Carter positions himself as the candidate who “feels your pain and shares your dreams.”

Carter, of course, was not the first presidential candidate to successfully use an appeal to average Americans. Before there were party conventions, Andrew Jackson positioned himself as “one of the people” in his campaign against John Quincy Adams: “Adams can write, but Jackson can fight!” Highlighting Adams as a member of the educated Bostonian elite and the candidate of the “rich and well born,” Jackson marketed himself as a scrappy war hero, a masculine representative of the new democratic spirit in America.

One of the joys of studying history through primary source documents is that it allows us to see how often themes and ideas recur in American culture, society, and politics. Armed with a nodding acquaintance of some past campaign speeches, you will find yourself a more insightful consumer of political material–and a more informed voter!

Karen Linkletter is lecturer in American studies at California State University, Fullerton.