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.^[1] 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. As of the 2020 presidential election^[update], 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;^[2] 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.^[3] 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.

^ "1980 Presidential General Election Results – Mississippi". Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas.
^ Sullivan, Robert David; ‘How the Red and Blue Map Evolved Over the Past Century’; America Magazine in The National Catholic Review; June 29, 2016
^ "Record number of voters expected at state polls". The Greenwood Commonwealth. November 4, 1984. p. 1. Archived from the original on June 14, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.

[Leip-1] "1980 Presidential General Election Results – Mississippi". Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas.

[how-2] Sullivan, Robert David; ‘How the Red and Blue Map Evolved Over the Past Century’; America Magazine in The National Catholic Review; June 29, 2016

[3] "Record number of voters expected at state polls". The Greenwood Commonwealth. November 4, 1984. p. 1. Archived from the original on June 14, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.

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