McCloskey (R-CA) Former Representative (California's 26th congressional district) James Roosevelt (D-CA; son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Governors and State Constitutional officers Former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox (D-GA) Former Alabama Governor John Malcolm Patterson (D-AL) Former Texas Governor Preston Smith (D-TX) Former Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams (D-MS) Current and former state and local officials and party officeholders Florida Fort Lauderdale City Advisory Board member Jim Naugle (D-FL) New York Former New York State Senator Jeremiah B. Bloom (D-NY) Celebrities, political activists and political commentators Former UCLA men's basketball head coach John Wooden Retired United States Navy Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (D-VA) Newspaper endorsements The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, Arizona The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California The Omaha World-Herald in Omaha, Nebraska The Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa The Record in Stockton, California The Repository in Canton, Ohio The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio The Blade in Toledo, Ohio Houston Chronicle in Houston, Texas Richmond Times-Dispatch in Richmond, Virginia Results The election was held on November 4, 1980. Ronald Reagan and running mate George H. W. Bush beat Carter by almost 10 percentage points in the popular vote. Republicans also gained control of the Senate on Reagan's coattails for the first time since 1952. The electoral college vote was a landslide, with 489 votes (representing 44 states) for Reagan and 49 for Carter (representing six states and Washington, D.C.). NBC News projected Reagan as the winner at 8:15 pm EST (5:15 PST), before voting was finished in the West, based on exit polls; it was the first time a broadcast network used exit polling to project a winner, and took the other broadcast networks by surprise. Carter conceded defeat at 9:50 pm EST. Some of Carter's advisors urged him to wait until 11:00 pm EST to allow poll results from the West Coast to come in, but Carter decided to concede earlier in order to avoid the impression that he was sulking. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill angrily accused Carter of weakening the party's performance in the Senate elections for doing this. Carter's loss was the worst performance by an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt by a margin of 18% in 1932, and his 49 electoral college votes were the fewest won by an incumbent since William Howard Taft won only 8 in 1912. Carter was the first incumbent Democrat to serve only one full