to carry several Midwestern and Northeastern swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, as well as every state in the Democratic-dominated region of the South, except for Virginia and Oklahoma. Ford dominated the Western states. Despite the political climate of the United States being predominantly conservative-leaning in the years prior to the election, Carter was able to achieve victory 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. Ford won 27 states, the most states ever carried by a losing candidate. As mentioned before, both of the major party vice-presidential nominees, Walter Mondale in 1984 and Bob Dole in 1996, would later win their respective party's presidential nominations, but lose in the general election (respectively to incumbent presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). 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 1980 with Carter's defeat by Reagan. Meanwhile, Ford's defeat marked the first time in 44 years that an incumbent president was voted out of office (after Herbert Hoover's loss in 1932). As of 2020, this remains the last time that the southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas voted for the Democratic candidate in a presidential election, and the last until 2008 in which North Carolina did so. This was also the last election where the winning candidate did not win a majority of the 51 jurisdictions that cast votes in the Electoral College (the 50 states plus the District of Columbia). Conversely, it remains the last time that a Democrat would win the presidency without carrying a number of modern blue states and swing states; namely, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. And a Democrat would