The United States presidential election of 1976 followed the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal. It favored the relatively unknown former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate over the incumbent President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate. 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.
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 united states, united, states and/or presidential:
“What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“I would rather be known as an advocate of equal suffrage than to speak every night on the best-paying platforms in the United States and ignore it.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“The Republican Vice Presidential Candidate ... asks you to place him a heartbeat from the Presidency.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)