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, over the incumbent President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate.
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 Twenty-fifth Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned in the light of scandal that implemented him in receiving illegal bribes when he was Governor of Maryland. Ford was thus the only sitting President who had never been previously 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 Ronald Reagan. The race was so close that Ford was not able 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. Carter narrowly won the election, becoming the first president elected from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848.
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