The United States presidential election of 1976 was the 48th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. It favored the relatively unknown former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate over the incumbent President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate.
The election followed the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford was saddled with a slow economy and paid a political price for his pardon of Nixon, although he did carry a majority of the states. Carter, running as a Washington outsider and reformer, won a narrow victory. He was the first president elected from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848.
Since 1976, no Democratic candidate has managed to match or better Carter's electoral performance in the American South, known to be a very Republican region in modern times.
Following the October 21, 2012, death of 1972 Democratic Party nominee George McGovern, this is now the earliest United States presidential election where one of the two major candidates is still living, that being the winning candidate Jimmy Carter, who is 88 years old.
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, swing and/or states:
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where.”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)