AP Gov 1

If you’re wondering how Lyndon B. Johnson had so many people on his side, there’s one simple way to put it. Retail Politics! This is when a particular person would go out personally to local events and meet individual voters one-to-one to learn their situations and political views and use that to their strategy. When it came to winning, LBJ had the patience and the humility to work with one person at a time. Craig Raupe states, “JFK would call five or six, LBJ would take nineteen names and call them all.” So, while John called his five or six friends of unwavering opinions, knowing no matter what they would always be on his side. Lyndon would gather all his steady voters with his hesitant voters for a better chance at gaining more by increasing the chance of having those extra voters that might just say “yes.”
Watching the rise of Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Retailer, House Speaker Tip O’Neill spent a great deal of his time trying to answer the LBJ question, “How’d he get there?” How did Ronald Reagan get the appeal of the public’s eye? The Answer, it was not another form of being the Great Retailer, focusing on the ones you get to know. “No, Ronald Reagan is a man of the media: the Great Wholesaler … he was positioning himself with enormous science, establishing himself in the public mind not as an aloof head of government but as the man next door. Every action was designed to make him appear close to the people and distant from the government.” This was just another form of political positioning. This is when a person decides to make him/herself important and choosing where they stand no matter what role they’ve been placed in. So, Johnson did not place himself in the role of presidency, but as the role of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan simply refused to be seen as a part of the government’s problems or mistakes, but more so as just another commoner with a better position in society.
In 1974, lame-duck, single-term governor, Jimmy Carter was running