U.S. presidential election, 1976

United States presidential election, 1976

← 1972 November 2, 1976 1980 →
All 538 electoral votes of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout	53.6% 1.6 pp
Nominee Jimmy Carter Gerald Ford Party Democratic Republican Home state Georgia Michigan Running mate Walter Mondale Bob Dole Electoral vote 297 240 States carried 23 + DC 27 Popular vote 40,831,881 39,148,634 Percentage 50.1% 48.0%
Presidential election results map. Blue denotes states won by Carter/Mondale, red denotes those won by Ford/Dole, pink is the electoral vote for Ronald Reagan by a Washington faithless elector. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
President before election Gerald Ford Republican Elected President Jimmy Carter Democratic

Gerald Ford
Republican

Jimmy Carter
Democratic

The United States presidential election of 1976 was the 48th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. The winner was the relatively unknown Jimmy Carter, a former Governor from Georgia with his running mate, Walter Mondale, the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, the Democratic candidates, over the incumbent President Gerald Ford from Michigan and his running mate, Bob Dole, the U.S. Senator from Kansas, the Republican candidates.

President Richard Nixon had resigned in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, but before doing so, he appointed Ford as Vice President via the 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned in the light of a scandal that implicated him in receiving illegal bribes while serving as Governor of Maryland. Ford was thus the only sitting President who had never been elected to national office. Saddled with a poor economy, the fall of South Vietnam, and paying a heavy political price for his pardon of Nixon, Ford first faced serious opposition from within his own party, when he was challenged for the Republican Party’s nomination by former California governor and future President Ronald Reagan. The race was so close that Ford was unable to secure the nomination until the Party Convention. Carter, who was less well known than other Democratic hopefuls, ran as a Washington outsider and reformer. He narrowly won the election, becoming the only president to date ever elected from Georgia and the first from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848.