Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter Signed Photograph.

FORD, Gerald and Jimmy Carter.

$750.00

Item Number: 36004

Signed color photograph of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter shaking hands. The photograph measures 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches. Double matted and framed. The entire piece measures 11 inches by 13 inches.

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 Jimmy Carter, a former Governor from Georgia with his running mate, Walter Mondale, the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, the Democratic candidates, over the incumbent President Gerald Ford from Michigan and his running mate, Bob Dole, the U.S. Senator from Kansas, the Republican candidates. 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 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned. 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 unable 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. He narrowly won the election, becoming the only president to date ever elected from Georgia and the first from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848. It was a notable election as all four presidential and vice-presidential candidates would ultimately lose a presidential election. Ford lost this year’s election and Carter failed in his bid for re-election in 1980; Mondale lost the 1984 election to incumbent Ronald Reagan in a landslide, and Dole lost his 1996 bid to incumbent Bill Clinton. It was also the most recent presidential election where the candidate who won the most states did not win the election, as well as the last time Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas voted for the Democratic candidate.