Presidency of Jimmy Carter taken on the eve of the election showed a close race, Reagan won a decisive victory. In polls of historians and political scientists, Carter is usually ranked as a below-average president. Carter was elected as the Governor of Georgia in 1970, and during his four years in office he earned a reputation as a progressive, racially moderate Southern governor. Observing George McGovern's success in the 1972 Democratic primaries, Carter came to believe that he could win the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination by running as an outsider unconnected to establishment politicians in Washington, D.C. Despite scant backing from party leaders, McGovern
Jimmy Carter Supreme Court candidates Jimmy Carter Supreme Court candidates During President Jimmy Carter's term in office, no vacancy occurred on the Supreme Court of the United States. Carter thus became the first president since Andrew Johnson and the fourth president overall (after William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and Johnson) to complete his term without making any appointments to the Supreme Court. As president, Carter actively sought to burnish his standing among women's rights groups by using the power of appointment provided by his office. By the end of his term, Carter had appointed forty-one of the forty-six women serving as federal judges and three