1976 United States presidential election (Ford/Dole)

The 1976 United States presidential election was the 48th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. Incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford from Michigan defeated Democratic Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia by a narrow victory of 283 electoral college votes to Carter's 250. As of 2022, this is the earliest presidential election where at least one of the candidates is still living.

President Richard Nixon had won the previous 1972 election, with Spiro Agnew as his running mate, but in 1973, Agnew resigned, and Ford was appointed as vice president. When Nixon resigned in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Ford ascended to the presidency, becoming the first, and only, president to take office without having been elected as either president or vice president. The Watergate scandal badly damaged the entire Republican party and its election prospects throughout the remainder of the decade. Ford promised to continue Nixon's political agenda and govern as a moderate Republican, causing considerable backlash from the conservative wing of his party. This spurred former California governor Ronald Reagan to mount a significant challenge against him in the Republican primaries, in which Ford narrowly prevailed at the convention. Carter was little-known at the start of the Democratic primaries, but the former governor of Georgia emerged as the front-runner after his victories in the first set of primaries. Campaigning as a political moderate in his own party, and as a Washington, D. C., outsider, Carter defeated opponents such as Mo Udall and liberal California governor Jerry Brown to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Ford pursued a "Rose Garden strategy" in which he sought to portray himself as an experienced leader focused on fulfilling his role as chief executive. On the other hand, Carter emphasized his status as a reformer who was "untainted" by Washington. Saddled with a poor economy, the fall of South Vietnam, and his unpopular pardon of Nixon, Ford trailed by a wide margin in polls taken after Carter's formal nomination in July 1976. Ford's polling rebounded after a strong performance in the first presidential debate, and the race was close on election day.

Ford won a majority of the popular votes and electoral vote, carrying the Midwestern states of Ohio and Wisconsin, along with the Southern state of Mississippi, as well as the Plains states and the Sun Belt states. Carter performed well in the South along with winning the Eastern Seaboard states of Pennsylvania and New York. Despite the political climate of the United States being predominantly conservative-leaning in the years prior to the election, Carter was able to achieve such a strong showing largely off of the backlash of the Watergate scandal that still was deeply hurting Republican candidates. Jimmy Carter also remains the most recent Democratic candidate in presidential history to win a majority of the Southern states and to win a majority of counties nationwide.

1976 was the last presidential election in which Democrats relied on the New Deal Coalition that united labor unions in urban centers, religious minorities (Jews, and Catholics), African Americans, southerners, and blue collar workers in the industrial Midwest, who had benefited from Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal, New Deal economic agenda since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Thus, Carter's win represented the last victory in a period of political dominance by the Democratic Party known as the Fifth Party System that had begun in 1932 and would end in, this election, 1976 with Carter's defeat by Ford.