The 1976 United States presidential election was the 48th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford from Michigan by a narrow victory of 297 electoral college votes to Ford's 240. This is the most recent presidential election, and the first since 1920, in which both major-party candidates for vice-president would go on to become the presidential nominee for their party in a later election. As of 2023, this is also 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. Carter won a majority of the popular and electoral vote. He was able