Roger MacBride presidential campaign, 1976
| Roger MacBride presidential campaign, 1976 | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Campaign | U.S. presidential election, 1976 |
| Candidate |
|
| Affiliation | Libertarian |
| Status | Lost election: November 2, 1976 |
| Key people | Ed Crane(campaign manager) |
| Slogan | I'm for Roger! |
The 1976 presidential campaign of Roger MacBride, a former member of the Vermont House of Representatives from New York began when Roger MacBride announced his campaign in 1975. He ran in the 1976 Libertarian Party presidential primaries, easily winning due to his celebrity status in the party as he was the faithless elector that gave them one electoral vote in 1972 and his scant opposition. MacBride campaigned against tariffs, antitrust laws, and the War on drugs and for the free market, civil liberties, an end to corporate welfare and an anti-interventionist foreign policy.[1][2]
General Election
After winning the Libertarian nomination MacBride tired to choose a vice president, but all of his choices could not get a majority until David Bergland came and according to him won the nomination since his "most important qualification was being over 35. Not many delegates attending were that old in 1975."[1] Roger believed that the damaged done to the Republican party following its 1976 primaries, the collapse of the American Independent Party and Eugene McCarthy`s poorly ran campaign could allow him to due well and receive many votes from disillusioned voters.[2] MacBride primarily focused on the western United States stating that "Early Americans ... struggling for survival in a hard wilderness ... grasped somehow that they were free, that no authority controlled them ... That truth released a burst of creative human energy such as the planet had never known, and created the modern world."[1]
Results
On November 2, 1976 MacBride lost the election, coming in fourth place behind Eugene McCarthy and only narrowly beat Lester Maddox by 2,000 votes, both of who he thought could siphon votes from and come ahead of. After the end of the campaign David Bergland said that ""Roger brought political savvy, but a somewhat limited understanding of the radical libertarian personality of the delegates."[1]
| Presidential candidate | Party | Home state | Popular vote | Electoral vote |
Running mate | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Percentage | Vice-presidential candidate | Home state | Electoral vote | ||||
| James Earl Carter, Jr. | Democratic | Georgia | 40,831,881 | 50.08% | 297 | Walter Frederick Mondale | Minnesota | 297 |
| Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (Incumbent) | Republican | Michigan | 39,148,634 | 48.02% | 240 | Bob Dole | Kansas | 241 |
| Ronald Wilson Reagan | Republican | California | —(a) | —(a) | 1 | |||
| Eugene McCarthy | (none) | Minnesota | 740,460 | 0.91% | 0 | (b) | (b) | 0 |
| Roger MacBride | Libertarian | Vermont | 172,557 | 0.21% | 0 | David Bergland | California | 0 |
| Lester Maddox | American Independent | Georgia | 170,274 | 0.21% | 0 | William Dyke | Wisconsin | 0 |
| Thomas J. Anderson | American | (c) | 158,271 | 0.19% | 0 | Rufus Shackelford | 0 | |
| Peter Camejo | Socialist Workers | California | 90,986 | 0.11% | 0 | Willie Mae Reid | 0 | |
| Gus Hall | Communist | New York | 58,709 | 0.07% | 0 | Jarvis Tyner | 0 | |
| Margaret Wright | People's | 49,013 | 0.06% | 0 | Benjamin Spock | 0 | ||
| Lyndon LaRouche | U.S. Labor | New York | 40,043 | 0.05% | 0 | R. Wayne Evans | 0 | |
| Other | 70,785 | 0.08% | — | Other | — | |||
| Total | 81,531,584 | 100% | 538 | 538 | ||||
| Needed to win | 270 | 270 | ||||||
Endorsements
Despite being the nominee of the Libertarian party when it was a fledgling party, Roger MacBride did manage to receive endorsements from newspapers such as Reason.[2]