Utah was won by incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford over the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. Ford took 62.44% of the vote in the state, while Carter took 33.65%, making Utah around 31% more Republican than the nation in the 1976 election.[1]
Utah was Ford's strongest state in the nation in terms of percentage of the vote, although unlike in Vermont, Ford didn't win every county in Utah. For a presidential candidate who lost the election nationwide, Ford won a record 27 states, a record which stands to this day, but Utah was the only state where Ford broke 60% of the vote statewide. Carter won the election nationwide, and despite the election solidifying Utah's place within the core of the Republican heartland (which it retains to this day), 1976 stands as the last occasion where a Democrat has carried Emery County,[2] where Carter obtained a fifty-four vote plurality win. After Nixon's clean sweep of all twenty-nine counties in 1972, Carter would also win Carbon County with 59.39% of the vote, but Ford won absolute majorities in all twenty-seven remaining Utah counties, with his total vote ranging from 50.34% in Tooele County to 72.50% in Kane County.[3]Ronald Reagan would repeat Nixon's 1972 clean sweep in bothhis elections, and no county in Utah except Carbon and Tooele would ever vote against a Republican until 2008.
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