United States presidential election, 1976

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 a scandal that implicated him in receiving illegal bribes when he was Governor of Maryland. Ford was thus the only sitting President who had never been 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 and future President 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.

United States presidential election, 1948

The United States presidential election of 1948 was the 41st quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 1948. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman, the Democratic nominee, who had succeeded to the presidency after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, successfully ran for election for a full term against Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee.

The election is considered to be the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that Truman would be defeated by Dewey. The Democratic Party had a severe ideological split, with the far left and far right of the Party running third-party campaigns. Truman's surprise victory was the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democratic Party, the longest winning streak in the history of the party, and second-longest in the history of both modern parties (surpassed only by the Republicans' six consecutive victories from 1860 to 1880). With simultaneous success in the 1948 congressional elections, the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress, which they had lost in 1946. Truman's feisty campaign style energized his base of traditional Democrats, consisting of most of the white South, as well as Catholic and Jewish voters; he also surprisingly fared well with Midwestern farmers. Thus, Truman's election confirmed the Democratic Party's status as the nation's majority party.

United States presidential election, 1924

The United States presidential election of 1924 was the 35th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 1924. Incumbent President Calvin Coolidge, the Republican candidate, was elected to a full term.

Coolidge had been vice-president under Warren G. Harding and became president in 1923 when Harding died during his term in office. Coolidge was given credit for a booming economy at home and no visible crises abroad. His candidacy was aided by a split within the Democratic Party. The regular Democratic candidate was John W. Davis, a little-known former congressman and diplomat from West Virginia. Since Davis was a conservative, many liberal Democrats bolted the party and backed the third-party campaign of Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party.

Garland S. Tucker, in a 2010 book, argues that the election marked the "high tide of American conservatism," as both major candidates campaigned for limited government, reduced taxes, and less regulation. The third place candidate, Robert La Follette, however, campaigned on a contrary platform.

United States presidential election, 1872

The United States presidential election of 1872 was the 22nd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1872. The incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant was easily elected to a second term in office, with Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as his running mate, despite a split within the Republican Party that resulted in a defection of many Liberal Republicans to opponent Horace Greeley of the Democratic Party, which also nominated the candidates of the Liberal Republican ticket that year.

On November 29, 1872, after the popular vote, but before the Electoral College cast its votes, Greeley died. As a result, electors previously committed to Greeley voted for four different candidates for president, and eight different candidates for vice-president. Greeley himself received three posthumous electoral votes, but these votes were disallowed by Congress. The election was the first in which every competing state used a popular vote to determine its electors; since 1832, South Carolina had been the lone state to decide electors by the state legislature. Florida's legislature had decided its electors in 1868. The election of 1872 is the only US presidential election in which a candidate has died during the electoral process.

United States presidential election, 1964

The United States presidential election of 1964 was the 45th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 3, 1964. Democratic candidate and incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to office less than a year earlier following the assassination of his predecessor John F. Kennedy. Johnson, who had successfully associated himself with Kennedy's popularity, won 61.1% of the popular vote, the highest won by a candidate since James Monroe's re-election in 1820. It was the sixth-most lopsided presidential election in the history of the United States in terms of electoral votes; in terms of popular vote, it is first. No candidate for president since has equaled or surpassed Johnson's percentage of the popular vote, and only Richard Nixon in 1972 has won by a greater popular vote margin.

The Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, suffered from a lack of support from his own party and his deeply unpopular conservative political positions. Johnson's campaign advocated a series of anti-poverty programs collectively known as the Great Society, and successfully portrayed Goldwater as being a dangerous extremist. Johnson easily won the Presidency, carrying 44 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

United States presidential election, 1904

The United States presidential election of 1904 was the 30th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 1904. Incumbent President and Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt, having succeeded to the presidency upon the assassination of William McKinley in September 1901, was elected to a term in his own right. During the election campaign, Republicans emphasized Roosevelt's success in foreign affairs and his record of firmness against monopolies. The nominee of the Democratic Party was Alton B. Parker, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals. The Democrats argued the Roosevelt Presidency was "arbitrary" and "erratic."

Roosevelt easily defeated Parker, carrying every region in the nation except the South. In doing so he became the first incumbent President to win election to a term in his own right after having ascended to the Presidency (from the Vice-Presidency) upon the death of his predecessor. Since then, Presidents Coolidge (1924), Truman (1948), and Johnson (1964) have done so as well.