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The 1976 United States presidential election was the 48th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. Democrat Jimmy Carter, former Governor of Georgia, defeated incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford in a narrow victory. This was the first presidential election since 1932 in which the incumbent was defeated, as ...
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The 1976 United States elections were held on November 2, and elected the members of the 95th United States Congress. The Democratic Party won the presidential election and retained control of Congress. [1] Former Democratic Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia defeated Republican incumbent President Gerald Ford. [2]
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United States presidential election of 1976, American presidential election held on Nov. 2, 1976, in which Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Republican Pres. Gerald R. Ford.
The campaign was conducted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that forced Pres. Richard M. Nixon to become the first president to resign the office; Nixon was succeeded by Ford, his vice president. Carter announced his candidacy on Dec. 12, 1974, in Washington, D.C.
With a political career that included only four years as an unheralded state senator and a single term as Georgia’s governor (he was prohibited by state law from seeking a second term), Carter was not given much of a chance early on. Political observers pointed out that, after he stepped down as governor in January 1975, he had no apparent political base, no organization, no standing in the polls, and little or no money with which to finance his campaign. But Carter had been planning his campaign carefully for two years prior to his announcement. His executive secretary, Hamilton Jordan (who would become his campaign manager), drafted the first installment of the Carter campaign plan before the presidential election of 1972. In it and subsequent installments, Carter’s manifest political weaknesses were duly noted, but he and his aides preferred to dwell on his strengths. His background as a naval officer, peanut farmer, agribusinessman, and late-blooming state politician, as well as his extraordinary ability to campaign on such issues as “love” and “trust,” were ideally suited to the mood of a public that, thanks to Watergate and the Vietnam War, had grown weary and cynical toward officials in Washington and politics in general.
Moreover, recent presidential elections had indicated that it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for a Democrat to win the presidency without the support of the old “Solid South” that had played such an important role in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition of the 1930s and ’40s. It was thought that Carter, a “New Southerner,” could appeal to both whites and African Americans and possibly bring the South back into the Democratic fold. He would have to overcome some bias that Northern liberals might have, as well as fears about his fundamentalist, born-again Christian, Southern Baptist faith. But these did not appear to be insurmountable obstacles.
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Carter planned to enter all of the 31 presidential primaries held in 1976 (actually, he entered 30, having failed to qualify a slate of delegates in West Virginia). He correctly assumed that the record number of primaries—plus the limitations on campaign spending and fund-raising imposed by the federal campaign finance law of 1974—would lead his better-known Democratic opponents to pick and choose among the state primaries in order to husband their resources. Carter’s decision to contest the nomination everywhere reflected his knowledge that, as a relative unknown, he needed as much exposure as possible and that the Democratic Party’s new rules would give him a proportionate share of delegates even in states where he did not finish first.
Carter’s plan served him well. Early victories in January’s Iowa caucuses and February’s New Hampshire primary, the results of his effective one-to-one campaigning techniques and his penchant for meticulous organization, put him on the covers of Time and Newsweek and established him as an early front-runner. He went on to defeat Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an “Old Southerner” making what many felt was his last try for national office, in Florida and North Carolina and in every other Southern primary except in Wallace’s home state. Carter scored an unexpectedly strong victory in Illinois and narrowly defeated his main liberal opponent, Rep. Morris K. Udall of Arizona, in Wisconsin. By the time of the April 27 Pennsylvania primary, only two other serious candidates remained in the race, Udall and Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington. Carter decisively defeated both of them in Pennsylvania, forcing Jackson out of the race and causing Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, who had been waiting in the wings in the hope that the active candidates would eliminate each other, to decide against an active candidacy for himself.
Meanwhile, Ford, the “accidental president” who had been appointed vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew’s resignation and succeeded to the presidency the next year when Nixon resigned, was having a much harder time of it in the Republican primaries. Despite victories in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Florida. Ford was unable to force his conservative challenger, former California governor Ronald Reagan, out of the race. Reagan went on to beat Ford in North Carolina and to trounce him in Texas, Indiana, and California, as well as in Georgia and several other Southern states. Ford countered with victories in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Suddenly the Republican Party, which generally prided itself on its decorum, had a civil war on its hands, while the normally fractious Democrats were headed for their most peaceful convention in at least 12 years.
Despite the Ford-Reagan fight during the primaries and immediately afterward, the Republicans nominated Ford on the first ballot at their convention in August. In an effort to strengthen his shaky base in the Midwest and the farm belt, the president surprised many delegates by choosing Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, known as a tough, hard-hitting campaigner, to be his running mate. Ford’s acceptance speech, in which he challenged Carter to a series of televised debates, was probably the best of his career.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The United States presidential election of 1976 followed the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal. It pitted incumbent President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate, against the relatively unknown former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate. Ford was saddled with a slow economy and ...
The 1976 United States presidential election happened on November 2, 1976. Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate and former Governor of Georgia, won the election. He defeated the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who was a Republican. Jimmy Carter won the election by 297 electoral votes, compared to incumbent president Gerald Ford, who ...
- Georgia
- Democratic
- Jimmy Carter
- Walter Mondale
Gerald R. Ford (Republican) v. Jimmy Carter (Democrat) The 1976 presidential election was the first held in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which had consumed the Nixon presidency and resulted in Gerald R. Ford becoming president. Ford had first become Vice President by congressional confirmation in the wake of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s own corruption scandal and resignation, resutling ...
The 1976 United States presidential election in Ohio took place on November 2, 1976. All 50 states and the District of Columbia were part of the 1976 United States presidential election. State voters chose 25 electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president . Ohio was won by former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter (D ...
