A presidential election was held in Indiana on November 2, 1976, as part of the 1976 United States presidential election. The Republican ticket of the incumbent president of the United States Gerald Ford and the junior U.S. senator from Kansas Bob Dole defeated the Democratic ticket of the former governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter and the junior U.S. senator from Minnesota Walter Mondale. Carter defeated Ford in the national election with 297 electoral votes.
Carter won the Democratic primary by a wide margin over his rivals. The closely-contested Republican primary saw the former governor of California Ronald Reagan defeat Ford in a narrow upset. Ford nevertheless went on to win his party's nomination at the 1976 Republican National Convention. Both major candidates campaigned in Indiana during the fall, with polls showing between 15 and 20 percent of the state's voters still undecided in the final weeks of the campaign. In the general election, Ford carried most of the counties comprising Northern and Central Indiana, while Carter did well in Southern Indiana counties in the Ohio Valley.
General election
Statistics
Carter carried Vigo County, Indiana, a national bellwether that supported the national winner in all but two presidential elections during the twentieth century. Carter's margin in Vigo County (2.3 percentage points) closely mirrored his national margin over Ford.
As of 2024, this is the most recent presidential election in which the Democratic ticket carried Dearborn, Dubois, Martin, Ohio, and Owen counties. This was the last election until 2024 in which St. Joseph County, Indiana, did not support the national popular vote winner.
Results by county
Counties that flipped from Republican to Democratic
- Blackford
- Clark
- Crawford
- Dearborn
- Dubois
- Floyd
- Gibson
- Greene
- Harrison
- Jefferson
- Knox
- Lake
- Martin
- Ohio
- Owen
- Posey
- Perry
- Pike
- Scott
- Switzerland
- Spencer
- Starke
- Sullivan
- Vermillion
- Vigo
- Warrick
- Washington
Hillary Rodham's involvement
Hillary Rodham (m. Clinton) was a state organizer for the Carter campaign in Indiana. She subsequently served as first lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, as U.S. senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and as U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Carter would recall Clinton's time as a campaign worker in Indiana during a speech supporting her candidacy in the 2016 United States presidential election. "During my 1976 presidential run, a young woman moved to Indianapolis to help turn out the Indiana vote for me," he said. "Forty years later, I will proudly cast my vote for that same woman to be the next President of the United States."