1980 United States presidential election in Maine
election in Maine
The 1980 United States presidential election in Maine took place on November 4, 1980. All fifty states and The District of Columbia were part of the 1980 United States presidential election. Voters chose four electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president. Maine was won by former California Governor Ronald Reagan (R) by a slim margin of 3%, carrying fourteen out of sixteen counties. In recent years, however, the state has grown much more liberal, and no Republican presidential nominee has carried it since 1988.
The already embattled incumbent Democratic president Carter was hurt in the state by the strong third party candidacy of John B. Anderson, a liberal Republican Congressman who ran in 1980 as an independent after failing to win the Republican Party's own presidential nomination. Anderson proved very popular with liberal and moderate voters in New England who normally leaned Democratic but were dissatisfied with the policies of the Carter administration and viewed Reagan as too far to the right. New England overall would prove to be Anderson's strongest region in the nation, with all six New England states giving double-digit percentages to Anderson. However, Maine would prove to be Anderson's weakest state in New England with only 10.20% of the popular vote, whereas all five of the other states in New England gave Anderson over 12% of the popular vote, peaking at 15.15% in Massachusetts.
Along with Michigan, New York, Mississippi and Vermont, Maine was one of the few states in which President Carter won counties that had gone to Ford in the previous presidential election, as Carter flipped Cumberland County.
“1980 United States presidential election in Maine” enters the record as election in Maine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what United, States and presidential can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “1980 United States presidential election in Maine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.