1980 United States presidential election in Mississippi

The 1980 United States presidential election in Mississippi took place on November 4, 1980. All fifty states and The District of Columbia were part of the 1980 United States presidential election. Mississippi voters chose seven electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

Mississippi was won, fairly consistently with predictions, by Reagan with a slim margin of 1.33 points. However, in future elections, the state would become a Republican stronghold, and no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since Jimmy Carter in the prior election. , this is the last election in which Winston County, Tippah County, Itawamba County, Union County, Prentiss County, Pontotoc County, Lee County, Lafayette County, Attala County, Monroe County, Madison County, Calhoun County, Tate County, Marion County, Leake County, Grenada County, and Franklin County voted for the Democratic candidate, as well as the last time that Clarke County was not carried by the Republican candidate; as Reagan and Carter ended up in a tie in Clarke County.

Along with Maine, New York, Michigan and Vermont, Mississippi 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 Franklin, Grenada, and Yazoo counties, in fact the largest number of counties he flipped in any state. Indeed, Mississippi shifted only 3.2 percentage points to the right in this election despite a much larger national swing; as such, the state trended a sizable 8.7 percentage points to the left relative to the nation at-large.

This is the last presidential election in which Mississippi voted more Democratic than the nation at-large. At the time it was the election with the largest number of votes in Mississippi history. This is the second-closest election in Mississippi after 1848 and the only time that a Republican has won Mississippi by a margin of less than 5 points.

Campaign
Both major party candidates targeted the state, with Governor William F. Winter giving incumbent president and Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter extensive support — support that had not been given to a Democratic nominee since Adlai Stevenson II during the 1950s. Mississippi, alongside Alabama, Florida and Texas, was a key state in Reagan’s plan to win the presidency by eating into Carter’s 1976 Southern support, especially as Carter’s Baptist identity held less weight than it had in 1976.

Philadelphia, notorious for the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers, was where Reagan began his campaign with a proclamation of “states’ rights” frequently compared with George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which had won over five-eighths of Mississippi’s total vote and over four-fifths of the white vote. Late in September, the state would be the target of simultaneous campaigning by Jimmy Carter’s mother Lilian, and simultaneously by Republican nominee, California Governor Ronald Reagan. Later in the campaign, however, Governor Winter issued a severe criticism of Reagan’s campaign for failing to debate agricultural policy.

62% of white voters supported Reagan while 35% supported Carter.

Counties that flipped from Democratic to Republican

 * Adams
 * Carroll
 * Clarke (became tied)
 * Covington
 * Desoto
 * George
 * Greene
 * Hancock
 * Lawrence
 * Marion
 * Neshoba
 * Pearl River
 * Perry
 * Stone
 * Wayne
 * Webster

Counties that flipped from Republican to Democratic

 * Franklin
 * Grenada
 * Yazoo