Shades of 1980
In 1980, I was 13 years old – basically at the dawn of my political consciousness. I don’t remember terribly much about the Carter presidency, except for the Sunday morning during Hebrew School in 1977 when they pulled us all out of class to watch Egyptian President Anwar Sadat speak to the Israeli Knesset in Tel Aviv – an early harbinger of the Camp David Peace Process that was Carter’s greatest achievement. I do remember the 1980 election, however. Coming from a Democratic household, it was not a happy occasion. What had seemed at points in the fall to be a close, hard-fought race turned out to be not only an inevitable defeat for Carter, but a disaster for the Democratic party nationwide.
Carter, as some may recall, had three serious problems. First, the Iranian hostage crisis was dragging on, a daily reminder of the ineffectiveness of US power against a fanatical opponent not willing to play by the rules. Second, the economy was stuck in a morass of “stagflation,” featuring the unlikely combination of high inflation, high interest rates and high unemployment. Finally, Carter had been hurt politically by a serious primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy, and was ill-positioned to deal with both Ronald Reagan and the centrist independent candidate John Anderson. I have read analyses of this election that suggested that, despite Carter’s flaws as a president and a candidate, he would likely have won if he’d faced any two of these three challenges, but couldn’t surmount all three.
Still, Carter went into the fall as the favorite, largely because voters had doubts about his opponent. Reagan had a record as an extreme conservative. He backed Goldwater in 1964 and challenged both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from the right in Republican Presidential primaries, where his candidacy was viewed with alarm by the GOP establishment. He was untested in foreign affairs and had a penchant for saying strange things on the stump.
Carter did his best to run as the known-quantity against a risky challenger, but was undone on several counts. First, Reagan’s performance in the second Presidential Debate went far to dispel misgivings about his stature and fitness for office, and also fatally inverted Carter’s incumbency campaign with the question “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Also, the presence of the independent Anderson on the ballot gave both disenchanted liberals and uncertain moderate Republicans an outlet for an anti-Carter vote that was not a vote for Reagan. It is by no means clear that Carter would have won a two-way race (Anderson got 6.1% of the popular vote, Carter got 41%, and Reagan won a clear majority with 50.7%), but it would have been closer, and the electoral map, where Reagan won a 489-49 landslide, would almost certainly not have looked as bad for the Democrats.
On election night, 1980, Reagan’s victory was all but assured. Carter had had a bad last couple of weeks, and Reagan was electrifying large crowds and running a flawless campaign. What was, at least in my house, most unexpected was the “coat-tails” that Reagan had in down-ticket races.
Though it’s hard to imagine today, in the mid-1970s, Democrats had commanding majorities in both houses of Congress. The 1974 mid-term election, right after Nixon’s resignation, produced a 61-seat supermajority for the Democrats in the Senate and a 120+ margin in the House. Many Senators of this era were fixtures dating from the 1940s and 50s, with national reputations and respect that crossed party lines.
But in 1980, voters across the country turned them out, great and small. Among the Democrats who lost their seats in the Reagan landslide were Senators George McGovern (SD), Frank Church (ID), Birch Bayh (IN), Warren Magnusson (WA), Abraham Ribicoff (CT), Stuart Symington (MO) and Herman Talmadge (GA). All of these were incumbents of tremendous stature in the Senate and in the Democratic party – Presidential candidates, Committee chairmen, keynote speakers at the Party conventions. Didn’t matter. They all went down. The result was to turn a 58-41-1 Democratic majority into a 53-46-1 Republican majority, the biggest swing since 1932. When people talk about the Reagan landslide in 1980, they don’t mean his 50.7% popular vote – they mean the way his late surge carried 44 states and crushed, at least temporarily, the Democratic Establishment in the Upper House.
A few of these losses were predicted. Demographics were trending against Democrats in the Plains states, South and Midwest where most of the damage was done. Still, it confirmed that a fundamental realignment had taken place, as the so-called “Reagan Democrats” had arrived, in numbers that no one had imagined until the results stared them in the face on the day after the election.
Since 1980, there have been three elections with an incumbent facing a challenger. In 1984, Reagan crushed Mondale. In 1996, Clinton handily defeated Bob Dole. Both of those elections featured politically-talented Presidents governing during an economic recovery, facing off against ineffective and shopworn challengers. In 1992, when Clinton beat George H.W. Bush, the dynamic was similar to 1980: choppy economy, inter-party struggles (with Buchanan), the presence of a strong, centrist third-party candidate on the ballot (Perot), and an articulate, energetic nominee able to turn out his party’s base.
As we enter the last week of the campaign, there are a number of similarities between Bush and Carter. While the polls show a close race (as they did in 1980), Bush rarely if ever gone over 50% in either the national or battleground state polls. If turnout is as strong as it appears it will be for the Democrats and the late-deciders break heavily for the challenger as is historically the pattern, we could see a repeat not only of the 1980 electoral landslide, but also a ripple effect downticket.
No, it doesn’t seem likely. But in 1980, the magnitude of Reagan’s victory didn’t seem likely either. And frankly, if Kerry is to win in a way that will allow him to actually take office in January, it will have to be in this kind of a victory.
9:38:44 AM 
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