United States presidential election, 1976 (Temporal Incursion 1918)

The United States presidential election of 1976 was the 48th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 1976. The winner was a relative unknown with Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, the Democratic candidate, over incumbent Vice President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate.

President Richard Nixon been impeached by the House in 1975 in the wake of the Watergate scandal but acquitted by the Senate later in the year, it was decided that Nixon serve out the rest of his term with significantly diminished powers while in office. Prior to his impeachment, he appointed Ford as Vice President whom replaced Spiro Agnew when he resigned in the light of a scandal that implicated him in receiving illegal bribes when he was Governor of Maryland. Ford was the automatic front-runner for the Republican nomination due to his status as Vice President. However, opposition came in the form of former California governor Ronald Reagan, attempting to unite a faction of conservative members of the House and Senate in an effort to remove Ford from the nomination. The race was so close that Ford was not able to secure the nomination until the Party Convention.Ford held his own against Reagan and secured the nomination. Saddled with a poor economy, the fall of South Vietnam, and being tied to the political legacy of Richard Nixon, Ford found it genuinely difficult to separate himself. Carter, who was less well known than other Democratic hopefuls, ran as a Washington outsider and reformer. Ford narrowly won the election, becoming the first president elected from the state of Michigan.