I was negative ten years of age in 1980. Wouldn’t be born until 1990.
Mondale. That’s why Reagan won so big. He was in a great position to win anyway, inflation dropping due to action by the Fed, enormous stimulus spending on the pointless SDI program with borrowed money seemed to improve the economy even though it would actually be an anchor on the future economy since it produced nothing, tax cuts for the rich which most of the population hadn’t yet seen would be replaced by tax increases for them, all these plus unifying the diverse political factions to create a conservative alliance, together these would have required an incredible opponent to defeat him, someone with charisma and able to expose the failure to actually improve the economy, lower taxes, and the out of control deficit spending.
Reagan was a very skilled demagogue. A lot of people loved that.
Thing is though, 1976 was really close. When you consider that the election was essentially between two nobodies (yes, Ford was President, but how many people heard of him before 1973?), the election was literally won by two states which Carter won by 0.3% of the vote, and 1.6% of the vote respectively. If Ford had taken Ohio and Wisconsin, he would’ve won the election. He also won 27 states to Carter’s 23.
That the Democratic nominee didn’t win in a landslide against Nixon’s chosen successor (who had fought a blood and guts campaign to be nominated) just two years after Watergate shows how weak Carter was as a candidate from the beginning, really.
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Reagan was hugely popular, having presided over a complete renaissance of the American economy and military. Mind you, that military didn’t actually DO anything, but that was kind of the point (see point 2 below). I was born in '60, so the '80s were my young adult years, and I can tell you that I was ever so grateful for the economic climate of '84, compared to the God-forsaken climate of the late '70s and early '80s.
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Reagan was seen as having put an end to the Communism domino-effect. By 1984, there were very few ongoing efforts by either the PRC or the USSR to destabilize other governments and replace them with communist regimes. Indeed, the view was that we were pushing back with some effect. Southeast Asia was stable, Latin America had contained the Communists to Nicaragua (and there were the Contras), and Africa had stopped seeing successful Communist takeovers. In the milieu of the Cold War, that was seen as VERY important.
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Mondale was absolutely the wrong candidate to run against a successful Reagan. He was inextricably tied to the “failed” Presidency of Carter. And, worse, he was seen as being an old-style liberal, at a time when the country had decided that Rooseveltian-Kennedian liberalism was a Bad Idea. He was selected by the Party (literally: he relied upon Super-delegates to win the nomination, which he didn’t have the votes for among the elected delegates) because (like H. Clinton last year) he was “in” with the party establishment. But while he might have been “in” with them, he was totally “out” with the rest of the country. And the only issue that ever surfaced that might have given him hope (age) was deftly defused by the famous Reagan quip at the second debate.
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Reagan was seen as being very moderate by most of the center of the electorate. He was hugely popular in California, a state that is not that friendly to Republicans, especially conservative ones. He racked up solid majorities in several normally liberal states, including New York, Illinois, Washington, etc. He was loved by the normally Democratic working white male, which saw him as championing their interests. He thus managed to appeal to all Republicans, most middle-of-the-roaders, and significant portions of traditional Democrats. That’s a tough combo to beat.
I might point out that the election that is best to compare 1984 to is 1936. The results were much the same (Alf Landon carried two states, but they combined to only 8 E.V.s, and the percentages of votes were not that much different (59% Reagan v. 61% Roosevelt). Both presidents were being re-elected after being seen as having halted economic slides, both were popular men, and both were running against someone who was cast as an old-school version of what had been rejected four years previously. The elections are not completely analogous, of course, but the parallels are not far off. And since Reagan barely squeaked by in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, his results came close to being little different from some other landslides.
Who did those over 50 vote for in 1984?
I’m just curious if there’s any data on how those who were say, 60-75 in 1984 voted. These people would’ve been old enough to have voted for Roosevelt in 1936 or 1940, who may have voted Democrat for most of their lives.
Reagan can’t be explained without looking at the recent history of the country, i.e. the previous 20 years or so before 1980.
Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll won out and are today’s norm, so nobody who didn’t live through that time can appreciate how hated (and therefore feared) they were at the time. The anti-capitalist hippies were hated. The Peacenik left was hated. The feminists were hated. The uppity blacks were hated. The Counterculture was not a single movement. The blocs I mentioned had enormous rifts with one another but that didn’t matter. They were lumped together as Other.
Nixon successfully played that card in 1968, creating a Silent Majority" of “decent” Americans and the Southern Strategy of pursuing former Democrats by assuring them he hated blacks and other Others more than the civil-rights-loving Dems did. His electoral map (plus Wallace’s states) greatly resembles Trumps’. Nixon’s list of hated groups and people also strongly resembles Trumps’. This is not a coincidence. We like to think that we vote for something. History tells us that much of the time people vote against something, and that something is seldom policies and usually people.
Ford had no chance in 1976 because Nixon’s stench lingered all over him and because the Democrats nominated a Southern governor. That turned the solid South around for one last time. Carter did not hate the right people, of course. He didn’t hate at all. Neither did Ford, which makes for interesting if futile speculation about how badly he would have done if elected. Reagan’s entire political life was of hating the Other. He came to power and prominence in California because he denounced the left in thunderous terms. He stayed in power by denouncing cities (urban, crime-ridden, minorities) and Commies and had the luck that Fed was competent enough to cut the ridiculous inflation of the 1970s. The Democrats had nothing comparable. Their base was at its low point, disaffected, in disarray, without a common enemy they could point to.
Demographics also played a major role. In 1980 whites voted for Reagan, men voted for Reagan, the elderly voted for Reagan; African-Americans and women voted for Carter. Sound familiar? The only significant difference was that the West voted Reagan, California going for its popular governor.
Demographics and time changed the overall picture. Cities are on the upswing all across the country and vote Democratic to what historically is an unprecedented uniformity. They are more alike than different in today’s world. Areas where people look around and see mostly other white faces are also more alike than different in today’s world. They hate (and therefore fear) the same people they did a half century ago but are now moving into a minority in a culture where their beliefs are counter to the mainstream. This gives them enormous incentive to protect what they have, and the Republicans have skillfully exploited this at the local level.
All this says that Reagan was not some kind of an aberration, but completely explainable by factors that existed before he came into office and remain long after he left. The two sides are now better balanced and winners are created by small things. The African-American vote went down seven percentage points in 2016, just enough for Trump to win states he would have lost if they had maintained Obama percentages. As a group they vote for, not against, but without the tremendous incentive to vote they didn’t show up. I find it likely that Trump will give a few extra percentage points on the left the incentive to vote against while removing a few percentage points from those who vote for, but small percentages are wildly unpredictable. Reagan’s wins were not. Nothing small about them.
Was California a Democratic state in 1984? The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won the state was in 1964 (LBJ over Goldwater), and a Democrat wouldn’t win the state again until 1992 (Clinton over Bush I). Even the 1964 win was an outlier: the last time before that when a Democrat won was 1948 (Truman over Dewey). So from 1948 to 1984, 10 presidential elections, the Republican candidate won 8 out of 10.
Looking at the list of governors over that same time period (1948 to 1984), it seems to favour the Republicans: four Republican governors and two Democratic governors.
You’re kind of making my point. The Democrats could have run almost literally anyone-- including Carter-- and won. And they did. Ford was destined to lose in 1976, even against one of the weakest Democrats ever. It’s my personal opinion that any Republican would have lost in 1976, but Ford was an especially poor bet.
Why was Ferraro considered such a bad candidate? I read briefly about her and it seems her husband had some questionable business dealings, but other than that she seems a pretty run-of-the-mill, establishment type.
SNL and the pardon hurt. I wish Ford was elected in 1976. He is honestly my second favorite post WWII President.
Which is why I won’t be able to explain it so you get it. Your perspective is from a different generation.
That same kind of thing worked for Obama in 2012 even without an economic boom. No other candidate would have gotten reelected with his economic record at the time.
I didn’t read asahi’s post at a claim that Ferraro was a particularly bad candidate, just that the electorate as a whole wasn’t ready for a woman VP. (Keep in mind, in 1984 there was a grand total of one female state governor in the entire country, and two women in the Senate. Ten years before that, there were no women in the Senate and there had never been any female governors who weren’t the wives / widows of other governors.)
Yep, take a look at the electoral map for 1976 if you want a good laugh.
A lot of people here are trying to understand Reagan’s election through the lens of 2017 political issues and beliefs. But 1984 was a long time ago, and the world was very different.
The cold war had a profound effect on American politics. In particular, the way it cut across party lines meant there was MUCH more bipartisanship back then. You had the ‘peace movement’ wing of the Democratic party which alienated the hawks in the party. So the Democrats were more split than the Republicans. And also, Republicans would compromise with a Democrats on domestic policy in order to get support for cold war military policies, and vice versa.
And like Trump, Reagan made a special effort to attract blue-collar workers, and they were a much bigger bloc back then. That was the beginning of the ‘Reagan Democrats’. So Reagan built a voting coalition of conservatives, cold war hawks, blue-dog Democrats, and moderates. Mondale got the Democratic base and few others.
It’s also hard to describe how big a change the country went through. Carter was a moralizing scold who told people to wear sweaters in their homes to save energy, who declared that a ‘malaise’ had descended across the country, and who presided over an era of renewed Soviet aggression including the invasion of Afghanistan. The economy was in the dumper, inflation was running out of control, and there was a pervasive sense that America was on the downslope.
Along comes Reagan, with a sunny persona, confidence in America, and a determination to beat back the Soviet Union. He promised to break the back of inflation and get the economy rolling again.
So, four years go by, and Reagan campaigns on promises fulfilled, with the best yet to come. Inflation was beaten, the economy was growing like crazy (a record high of 7.2% GDP growth in 1984!), the Soviets are being pushed back around the globe, etc.
As a side issue, Reagan’s popularity took a huge jump after he was shot and handled the situation with the kind of character Americans admired - joking with doctors, acting calmly and courageously, etc. His economic initiatives at that time were being stalled by Democrats, but after he returned and gave a moving speech to Congress, a surge in national popularity (especially among Democrats, whose approval rating of Reagan jumped from 38% to 51%, and from independents, who went from 53% to 70%) caused many of Reagan’s policies to be passed, allowing him to take credit for the boom in 1984. He was ‘lucky’ in that the shooting gave him a surge in popularity right when he needed it most. His approval ratings sank back to average shortly thereafter, but not until congress had signed off on large parts of his economic and military proposals.
To be fair, that was during a very long coal miners’ strike, when it looked like we might have a finite amount of fuel.
People got into arguments everywhere about things like whether we ought to be helping the miners’ families-- their children were going without food, and one one hand, “Think of the children!” and on the other, this should get them back to the negotiating table.
My parents were big supporters of labor, who gave donations of canned food and used clothing and things every time there was a collection for the miners’ families. Our next-door-neighbors were "they should get back to work"ers. We had our own cold war.
My parents limited the amount of time we could have the TV on during the day to save electricity, and believe me, I was happy when the strike was over. They changed all the lights to 60W from 100, and made me read by a small lamp with the ceiling light off. And did we ever wear the sweaters. You could keep meat in our living room.
This is the standard positive interpretation of the Reagan years. Note how closely it adheres to my interpretation, which takes the same incidents and associates them with the things that Reagan supporters proudly and openly hated. Also note that it doesn’t mention racial issues at all. Ignoring the concerns of minorities was a hallmark of the Reagan years, as was the freedom to publicly ignore minorities without serious repercussions.
Ferraro was nationally unknown prior to the convention. The feeling among many was that she was selected solely for being female and democratic, rather than for any intrinsic political value of her own. And she was not what 1984 America saw as a traditional woman, with her short hair and her very feisty personality.
Her husband was a sleazebag, frankly, which didn’t help any. And the Republicans draped him around her neck as fast as they could; by the end of August any value she had brought to the campaign had been lost.
California is a Democratic state that has a lot of moderates from both parties. Reagan had followed the VERY Democratic Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who managed in two terms to do some significant fiscal damage to the state. Reagan accomplished a lot in his two terms, but mostly by being a very willing-to-compromise moderate Republican (who raised taxes significantly at the start of his first term to get us out of a hole, IIRC) dealing with a strongly Democratic state legislature. He was followed by Edmund G. Brown, Jr. (Jerry Brown), who returned the state to its previously scheduled liberal ways.
The election of George Dukmejian in 1982 can be attributed mostly to the success of Reagan as President (and also to the resistance of the state to vote for a “black” governor). The election was very close (1.2%; exit polls had him losing) His re-election in '86 was based upon the same factors. He was followed by Pete Wilson, who was a moderate Republican, elected senator from the state the same year “Duke” was first elected governor (defeated Jerry Brown to do it). Wilson was very Reaganesque as Governor, raising taxes as needed to balance the budget, and staying moderate and willing to compromise. However, he probably killed state-wide Republican chances for most candidates (Schwarzenegger was not a Republican, regardless what he ran as) when he campaigned in favor of Proposition 187, which tried to enshrine discrimination against undocumented immigrants into state law.
In short, California was not a reliable Democratic shop in terms of state-wide votes, but was a state that leaned to the liberal side. Reagan was a moderate Republican while governor, which earned him the popularity of many people who otherwise would have been more reliably “Democratic” in their voting patterns. But, then the state at the time was a bit maverick in voting patterns generally; We had both Sen. Alan Cranston and Sen. S.I. Hiyakawa at one point, if memory serves me correctly. 