439,687 124,266 72.8% 20.6% Start date November 4, 1980 | 124,266 30,284 20.6% 5.0% | |
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The 1980 United States presidential election in Utah took place on November 4, 1980. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 1980 United States presidential election. Utah voters chose four electors to the Electoral College, which selected the President and Vice President of the United States.
Utah was won by former Governor of California Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee, who was running against incumbent President and former Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee. Reagan ran with former C.I.A. Director George H. W. Bush of Texas, and Carter ran with Walter Mondale, incumbent Vice President and former senator from Minnesota. Reagan won the election nationally by a landslide.
Utah was the most Republican state in the nation. Reagan’s win in Utah during the 1980 election remains the most recent occurrence during a United States presidential election in any state of one candidate receiving a plurality exceeding half the total votes polled. Reagan won Carbon County by a mere three votes, but smashed Carter, who was widely criticized for his inability to understand issues specific to the West (especially water development) everywhere else. Carter’s next best county was Tooele where Reagan obtained 62 percent of the vote; Reagan surpassed three-quarters of the vote in seventeen of twenty-nine counties.
Liberal Republican John B. Anderson ran as a third-party candidate with some success in the Northeast, Western Washington and some college towns; however in conservative, Mormon Utah, Anderson possessed little appeal and could not exceed 9.4 percent of the vote in any county, polling merely three votes in Piute County and only 1.4 percent in Wayne County.