Talk Elections

Only Southern State he didn't carry that year.

Also, did Governor Ronald Reagan lose the primary to George H W Bush in Michigan in 1980 because he primaried President Gerald Ford in 1976?

Someone is probably much more knowledgeable than I am on this, but the Southern states that seemed to accept conservatism the fastest in the mid-Twentieth Century were Florida, Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina.  Oklahoma and Texas seem tied to being A) more Western, B) more pro-business in general with oil and C) have a lot of Northern transplants.  Mississippi and South Carolina were, likely, serious backlash to national Democrats courting the Black vote more aggressively.  If I were to GUESS RE: Virginia and Florida, I would say they had the most "fiscally conservative" Northern retirees?  At least I would imagine that to be the case in Florida.  Virginia's suburbs (NOVA) were relatively young/growing then, so they were probably much more conservative than they are today, too.

From what I know, Virginia bucked the trend of the South that year, not only rejecting Jimmy Carter but reelecting an Independent Senator, Harry F. Bryd, Jr. over the Democratic nominee. I think that another factor in Carter losing Virginia was the relative poor turnout of blacks there. He clobbered Ford there 91 to 5 percent, but the turnout was rather low. Carter also underperformed in most metropolitan areas there.

Why did Clinton win it but not Trump?

The answer: NoVA.

Virgina was one of the states that was moderately Republican at the time, it bucked the "solid south" trend earlier. Between 1952-1976, Virginia only voted for one Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964, by the 1970s Virginia was the bastion of Republicans in the South.

A lot of the folks in NOVA as well as Richmond aren't of the native Southern stock, even in 1976. So you're dead on the money with that. I may wrong about this, but I recall reading that Virginia Blacks were some of the last Southern Black voters to swing over to the Democrats, so this may have had some lingering effects in '76.

It was more urban, professional, suburban, and white collar than the rest of the South.  Same reason it was the only former Confederate state to vote for Hillary.

Well, if someone is going to bump this ... haha, I have always been fascinated with the development of Black political loyalty.  There is seriously hardly any pre-1932 data (convenient, Democrats!  Lol, just kidding), and most of the "story" is told through generalization.  (FDR won over the Black vote because New Deal, and Goldwater pushed them to GOP for good, that end of story!)  I want to know the details of if different geographic areas might have switched from the GOP first, which remained more loyal, what sub-demographics of Blacks switched first, etc.

I haven't read the book myself, but Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR, by Louis Harlan, is a work that's very highly regarded and I believe it discusses many of those questions.

There was an unusual US Senate race that year.  Incumbent Harry F. Byrd, Jr (I) ran against Adm. Elmo Zumwalt (D).  Byrd voted with the Democrats in the Senate, but voted pretty much like a Republican, and Zumwalt was associated with Carter.  There was no Repubican in the Senate race.

I suspect that if Byrd had run unopposed, or if Byrd had only a Republican opponent (but no Democrat), Carter might have won.  Byrd beat Zumwalt with something like 58% of the vote, and Carter only lost VA by 1.34%, so little things might have meant a lot here.

I can' give you the precise numbers or sources (because I don't remember them), but I do recall learning that inland Southern blacks switched from the GOP to the Dems first. Coastal Blacks switched later.

Interestingly, even Strom Thurmond seemed to do quite well in many of the Black Belt counties in South Carolina during his Senate races (for instance, in '78, despite only winning by 10, Strom won a ton of those Black-Belt counties that are now seen as solid D.  Do you think those results were a result of lower turnout, or did he actually get a reasonable chunk of the black vote?  Because there's something very bizarre about Thurmond outperforming Tim Scott amongst black voters.

Black turnout wasn't comparable to white turnout in many rural Southern counties until 2008.  If you look at percent registered to vote vs. age among Southern black voters, there is still a lingering effect of Jim Crow on those over age 65.  I doubt that most majority black counties in the rural South actually had majority black voter registration by 1976.  Note how many of these counties actually swung to Carter in 1980.  That's probably because black voter registration was still catching up.

In thinking about Virginia, its voting laws during the Jim Crow era were more comparable to the worst offenders in the Deep South than to neighboring Upper South states.  Virtually all black people and a large swath of poor white people couldn't vote in VA until the compounding poll tax finally fell for the 1967 state elections.  It's likely that both black and poor white communities were still punching below their weight in VA 9 years later.  Throw in the much larger GOP voting suburban communities that simply weren't present in e.g. SC/AL/MS at the time and it's remarkable Carter got as close as he did.