It was mostly due to the Iranian hostage crisis. Every night on TV there was a count "Day 123: America held hostage!" - this was when the ABC news show Nightlin

It was mostly due to the Iranian hostage crisis. Every night on TV there was a count "Day 123: America held hostage!" - this was when the ABC news show Nightline with Ted Koppel got it's start. Also, the economy wasn't great. We had inflation - though to be fair that started during the Nixon/Ford admins and was largely due to 1) Vietnam war spending and 2) the Arab oil embargo. Unemployment was also fairly high (around this time the term 'stagflation' was coined.) Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in '79 with the full knowledge that Volcker planned to significantly raise interest rates in order to curb inflation - in fact, Volcker did not expect to be chosen as Fed chairman because he made it clear to Carter in his interview that he would significantly raise rates. By the time of the election the Fed rate was around 13% which began to slow the economy significantly. Add to this that Carter was very honest with the American people that they needed to consume less and develop alternative forms of energy to become less dependent on authoritarian regimes. Well, it was all too much for most of the electorate. Carter did the hard things that needed to be done. Volcker raising interest rates was absolutely the right thing to do and it did quell inflation a few years down the road, but Carter bore the brunt of the immediate political fallout. Carter was thinking further ahead than probably any president in my lifetime (from JFK through Biden). He was the first president to take climate change seriously. If we would've listened to him I think we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're in now. But American politics is a short-term game... and it's even moreso now than it was then.