Presidential Election Results

Going back to President Richard Nixon's 49-state landslide in 1972, the Republicans have carried Mississippi in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, including the last eight in a row. The most recent Democratic presidential nominee to win the Magnolia State was Jimmy Carter in 1976, and the last one before that was Adlai Stevenson in 1956.

Mississippi voted for a third-party presidential ticket in 1948, which included our governor as the vice-presidential nominee. The state voted for the Democrat Stevenson in 1952, for the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, and for the independent George Wallace in 1968. In 1960, a slate of unpledged electors carried Mississippi with 39 percent of the vote, and they wound up voting for Senator Harry Byrd Sr., a Virginia Democrat (one of those electors, future lieutenant governor Charles Sullivan of Clarksdale, was also a third-party presidential nominee in Texas, where he got some 18,000 votes. Not bad for an unknown, especially since Lyndon Johnson was on the Texas ballot as both the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and for re-election to the U. S. Senate.)[1]

Here, as of January 6, 2009, are Mississippi's vote totals from the November 4, 2008 presidential election:

Barack Obama (Democrat)-- 554,662
John McCain(Republican)-- 724,597
Ralph Nader (independent)-- 4,011
Bob Barr (Libertarian)-- 2,529
Chuck Baldwin(Constitution) 2,551
Cynthia McKinney (Green)-- 1,034

Ballot Access News has the totals for all 50 states.

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[1] State tax collector William Winter of Grenada County supported the 1960 Democratic ticket of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as U. S. senator Jim Eastland also did. Winter and Sullivan debated each other, and Winter chided the Coahoma countian for "wearing two hats" in the campaign. Winter, now age 86, also served as state representative, state treasurer, lieutenant governor, and governor.