The electoral map from yesterday's "Which Election Was It" post is from 1976. Democrat Jimmy Carter ran a reformer campaign in the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal and won a closer-than-expected contest against President Gerald Ford, who had elevated from the vice-presidency to the presidency just two years before, following the resignation of President Nixon.Southern whites, who had been voting Democratic since before the Civil War, abandoned the Party in 1964 following President Lyndon Johnson's signing of civil rights legislation. But in Carter they had a favorite son (he was the governor of Georgia) and a born-again christian. A combination that led to an almost solid sweep of the deep southern states in the 1976 Electoral College contest.
Four years later, on the heels of the debacle that was Carter's presidency, the region would shift back to the Republicans and that is where it has remained more or less (Clinton picked up a few southern states in 1992 and 1996) since.
(Side note: In a sign of America's future rightward tilt, a Republican elector in Washington State cast his ballot in December of 1976 for Ronald Reagan even though his name wasn't on the ballot. That explains Ford's electoral tally of 240 rather than 241.)
