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 former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate,[2] 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 improve on Carter's electoral performance in the American South, a Republican stronghold in presidential races beginning in 1980. Carter carried every state of the former Confederacy except for Virginia. This is the earliest election for president where one of the two major party candidates is still alive (That being Carter) and both members of one presidential ticket (Carter and Walter Mondale). The surprise winner of the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination was Jimmy Carter, a former state senator and governor of Georgia. When the primaries began. Carter was little known at the national level, and many political pundits regarded a number of better-known candidates, such as Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, and California Governor Jerry Brown, as the favorites for the nomination. However, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Carter realized that his status as a Washington outsider, political centrist, and moderate reformer could give him an advantage over his better-known establishment rivals. Carter also took advantage of the record number of state primaries and caucuses in 1976 to eliminate his better-known rivals one-by-one. Senator Jackson made a fateful decision not to compete in the early Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, which Jimmy Carter won after liberals split their votes among four other candidates. Though Jackson went on to win the Massachusetts and New York primaries, he was forced to quit the race on May 1 after losing the critical Pennsylvania primary to Carter by twelve percentage points. Carter then defeated Governor Wallace, his main conservative challenger, by a wide margin in the North Carolina primary, thus forcing Wallace to end his campaign. Congressman Udall, a liberal, then became Carter's main challenger. He finished second to Carter in the New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New York, Michigan, South Dakota, and Ohio primaries, and won the caucuses in his home state of Arizona, while running even with Carter in the New Mexico caucuses. However, the fact that Udall finished second to Carter in most of these races meant that Carter steadily accumulated more delegates for the nomination than he did. As Carter closed in on the nomination, an "ABC" (Anybody But Carter) movement started among Northern and Western liberal Democrats who worried that Carter's Southern upbringing would make him too conservative for the Democratic Party. The leaders of the "ABC" movement - Idaho Senator Frank Church and California Governor Jerry Brown - both announced their candidacies for the Democratic nomination and defeated Carter in several late primaries. However, their campaigns started too late to prevent Carter from gathering the remaining delegates he needed to capture the nomination. By June 1976, Carter had captured more than enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination. At the 1976 Democratic National Convention, Carter easily won the nomination on the first ballot; Udall finished in second place. Carter then chose Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, a liberal and political protégé of Hubert Humphrey, as his running mate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Presidential_Election

• published: 28 Apr 2013
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