The Promise: "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!"
By GEORGE J. CHURCH
The President's triumph ranks with the biggest ever
For an utterly predictable election, it managed to generate surprising suspense and even a bit of tension at the very end. Not about who would win, of course, or even whether it might be close; the public opinion polls had pretty well answered that. Rather, the question was whether Ronald Reagan would win re-election by a historic landslide. The verdict came almost the moment the count began: a resounding yes.
On television maps it showed up as a tide of blue (or red, depending on the network) rolling inexorably south to north, east to west, and as a vaulting column of electoral votes for Reagan towering over a nearly invisible stack for Democratic Challenger Walter Mondale. Partisans on both sides were awestruck. "Embarrassing, just embarrassing," muttered Mondale's campaign manager, Robert Beckel. Democrat Nancy Dick, conceding defeat in her bid for a Senate seat from Colorado, lamented, "My loss is part of a national disaster that our party is suffering." In the Reagan camp, Pollster Richard Wirthlin crowed early in the evening, "If these numbers hold, it's not [just] a landslide. The whole mountain will have moved."
The numbers in the end did not hold up quite that well, but almost. Reagan failed by an eyelash to get the 50-state sweep he had aimed for, but he carried 49 states, only the second time that has been done (Richard Nixon was first in 1972).
Reagan's margin, 525 electoral votes to 13 for Mondale, was exceeded in modern times only by Franklin D. Roosevelt's 523-to-8 crushing of Alf Landon in 1936.* As of Wednesday morning, Reagan was winning 59% of the popular vote, a share not much below Lyndon Johnson's record 61.1% in 1964. Ironically, Reagan came close to the 63% vote garnered two days earlier by the Marxist Sandinistas in a Nicaraguan election that Washington had denounced as rigged. Mondale was left with ten electoral votes from his home state of Minnesota and three from the District of Columbia. His 41% share of the popular vote was little more than Republican Barry Goldwater won in 1964 or Democrat George McGovern in 1972.
The Republican surge was so all embracing as to make almost superfluous the elaborate demographic analyses conducted by political experts. Mondale won an overwhelming percentage of blacks, and thinner majorities among Jewish voters, union households and those earning less than $10,000 a year. Period. Reagan took everything else, sweeping every imaginable category of voter: young, middle-aged and elderly; low, middle and high income; Protestant and Roman Catholic; professional and blue collar.
Yes, and women too. Before the polls opened, the campaign's chief claim to a place in the history books had been the Democrats' nomination of Geraldine Ferraro for Vice President. But the presence of a woman on a major party's national ticket for the first time did not widen the gender gap. Polls of people leaving the voting booths indicated that some 54% of female voters pulled the lever for Reagan. That did not quite match the Republican's crushing 62% support among male voters. But it indicated that if the election had been conducted solely among women, Reagan would still have won--big.
If there was any modulation of Republican joy, and any consolation for Democrats, it was that the President did not demonstrate much of a coattail pull. The G.O.P. retained control of the Senate as expected, but suffered a net loss of two seats from its pre-election 55-to-45 majority. In the House, Republicans did not come close to recapturing the 26 seats they lost to Democrats in the 1982 midterm election; Wednesday-morning projections gave them a net gain of ten to 15. That would not only keep the Democrats in control of the lower chamber; it might deny Reagan the "ideological majority" of Republicans and conservative Democrats that he enjoyed in the first two years of his term.
On the presidential level, though, Reagan's sweep was emphatic enough at least to raise the question: Might this be the realigning election that could make the Republican candidate, whoever he or she may be, the favorite in future contests for the White House? There is not much hard evidence. The percentage of voters identifying themselves in exit polls as Republicans did rise about five points from 1980, but still was only about 35%. There were some indications, however, that realignment is at least a possibility, given a suc cessful Reagan second term. The election destroyed the long-held assumption that an increase in voting automatically favors the Democrats. The total vote on Tuesday rose only to a projected 89.3 million, from 86.5 million in 1980; the percentage of those eligible who actually cast ballots fell to 51.4% from 52.6% four years ago. Nonetheless, most of the new voters obviously went to Reagan. On top of that, the President won nearly two-thirds of the votes cast by youths 18 to 24, his highest margin in any age group and something of a new constituency for the Republicans.
There was no question what the election said about the national mood. For the first time in at least a dozen years, Americans were voting for rather than against. They were not necessarily approving Reagan's conservative ideology, though that ideology holds more sway than anyone could have guessed even in 1980, or rewarding his engaging personality, attractive though it obviously is. Above all they were expressing satisfaction with what has become a rarity in American politics: what seems to be a successful presidency, in terms of economic growth and national strength and pride, especially in contrast to the turbulent terms that preceded it. Said Edward Reilly, a Boston-based pollster who conducted national research for Mondale: "The status quo with Reagan was preferable to the risk of going back to Carter-Mondale. There was no compelling reason to leave Reagan." The very notion of having a President serve two terms might have proved significant to many voters.
Mondale bowed to overwhelming defeat with dignity and grace. After voting near his home in North Oaks, Minn., he traveled to St. Paul for dinner at the Radisson Plaza Hotel with his campaign staff. Said his press secretary, Maxine Isaacs: "It was not a weepy scene at all, just quiet." The Democratic challenger then secluded himself to write the concession speech he delivered to a sparse crowd of 1,000 at the St. Paul Civic Center. Over some shouts of "No!" Mondale, his face at times mournful but his voice steady, said Reagan "is our President, and we honor him tonight. This choice was made peacefully, with dignity and with majesty . . . We rejoice in the freedom of a wonderful people, and we accept their verdict."
The man who had received that verdict was the picture of joy Tuesday, though there was one slight pall. His wife Nancy was still suffering dizziness after a fall Sunday night at a hotel in Sacramento. She joined the President on a helicopter trip to vote in Solvang, Calif., but tottered as they left the polling place. Then her knees buckled as she climbed down the helicopter steps in Santa Monica on the way back to Los Angeles; Reagan and a Secret Service agent grabbed her arm to keep her from falling.
During an interview with TIME on Tuesday afternoon, Reagan said, "I'm kind of concerned. She feels a little unsteady. She really hurt herself in the middle of the night [Sunday]. The hotel is one of those where the bed is up on a platform. During the middle of the night she got cold, and there was an extra cover in the room; she got up and forgot all about the platform. The next step there was nothing there, and she did a header into a chair. She has got quite an egg concealed under her hairdo." The First Lady was stoic with reporters. Said she: "My bump is gone. I feel fine."
The Reagans watched election returns on four television sets in a suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. They were driven to the Los Angeles home of Businessman Earle Jorgensen, a longtime friend, for dinner and returned to the Century Plaza for an elaborate victory celebration just as the polls closed at 8 p.m.
The President was greeted by 3,000 flag-waving supporters who surged through the hotel ballroom. The First Family formed a line on the stage, with Reagan looking buoyant but his wife still tentative in her movements. "It seems we did this four years ago," quipped Reagan, recalling his 1980 celebration in the same room. Then he turned serious, reciting a familiar list of accomplishments: lower inflation, more jobs, cuts in Government spending, strengthened military forces. "But our work isn't finished," he said. "Tonight is the end of nothing; it's the beginning of everything." He closed with his standard rally-ending line: "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"
It was a cry that had resounded constantly through the final week of the campaign, foreshadowing the sweep to come. For his closing swing, beginning in Boston last Thursday, Reagan gathered into his entourage most of his closest aides, including some who have been campaigning with him, in California and nationally, for 20 years. Their exultation was mixed with a note of melancholy: this was the last hurrah.
Reagan's five-day, eleven-state, 16-city tour had obviously been mapped out in the belief that his re-election was a certainty and a 50-state sweep highly possible. Reagan invaded Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, where he would never have gone at the end of a campaign that looked at all close; he could have won easily without them, but hoped to deny Mondale the electoral votes of the few states that the Democrat seemed to have a chance of carrying. The President even added a brief, unscheduled foray into Mondale's Minnesota just to demonstrate, as he put it, that "we have never written off any state." Crowds wherever he went got the point; they took to chanting, "Fifty states!"
Everywhere, Reagan urged his listeners to vote on Election Day. As he put it to a crowd of 10,000 in the War Memorial Arena in Rochester: "The polls are scaring me to death because I have a feeling that maybe some people are looking at them and saying, 'Oh, we don't have to go and vote. It's all over.' Well, President Dewey told me to tell you that isn't true." The crowd answered with shouts of "Four more years!" At every stop Reagan also worked in a plug for Republican senatorial and congressional candidates.
En route to California for the last day of the campaign, Reagan got a briefing from Pollster Richard Wirthlin, who illustrated the latest survey results with a colored map. States were tinted to show not who was leading but the size of the President's margin: blue for 20 points or more (25 states); red for 10 to 20 points (21 states); green for 5 to 10 points (four states); orange for fewer than 5 (one state, Iowa). Only Minnesota was left white to indicate no lead--and even there, Wirthlin's polls showed the President and Mondale neck and neck. As it turned out, Wirthlin's map was remarkably prescient. After his briefing from the pollster, the President played Trivial Pursuit with aides. His fabled luck held to the end: he drew one question asking who said, "I am the Errol Flynn of B movies." Reagan replied correctly, "I did."
The campaign finale was a rally Monday night in the same San Diego shopping mall in which Reagan closed his 1980 drive. It was a Reagan classic. The President's speech was laced with lines from his past orations, barbs at Mondale, patriotic uplift. As he finished, fireworks erupted, skydivers using parasails descended, thousands of red, white and blue balloons rose to meet them.
Mondale, in contrast, appeared in the last few days to be a campaigner who was trying merely to make the result respectable. At a Monday rally in downtown Los Angeles, he unashamedly asked the crowd of 10,000 to help him avoid a shutout. Said Mondale: "Either we will make history or they will make history. Mr. Reagan understands that. That's why he is calling for a clean sweep. Now if they make history, they'll claim a historic mandate. So before you vote, just pause a moment and think about it." On Monday, he flew to St. Paul to await what his staff knew would be grim news.
Did the last-minute campaign pleas matter? In fact, did the entire campaign make any difference? In hindsight, the result seemed almost preordained. The election was dominated, first to last, by four Ps: Prosperity, Peace, Patriotism and Personality. An incumbent running at a time of low inflation, rising incomes and employment, and absence of wrenching foreign crises would have been difficult to defeat no matter what. When, in addition, the incumbent happened to be a master television performer adept at stirring feelings of patriotic pride, matched against an often plodding campaigner deeply wounded by a bitter primary fight in his own party--well, the ingredients for a landslide were present from the start.
Perhaps the deepest analysis of the campaign, indeed, is also the simplest: nothing ever happened to shake the sunny optimism and patriotic fervor Reagan has spent four years inspiring. Democrats thundered about the dangers of deficits and a nuclear-arms race, but they never raised serious doubts about Reagan's leadership. The President did not even spell out a program for his second term: it was enough to assert that "America is back, standing tall" and ask crowds repeatedly, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" They invariably roared back "Yes!" They did the same with their votes on Tuesday.
Says Reagan's campaign chairman, Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt: "In modern political history, no one has ever had a firmer base of support over a matter of months. It has been a wall of granite." A Mondale strategist offers the same fundamental analysis. Says he: "The President's favorability rating in the polls stayed at about 60% throughout the election. The voters stayed put."
The outcome did not seem so inevitable at the start of the year, though. Despite his winning personality, Reagan throughout his political career has been a polarizing figure who stirs strong antipathy as well as fervent support. Reagan Strategist Stuart Spencer describes the President as "an ideological incumbent who broke a lot of china as he rearranged the nation's priorities over the course of four years." Indeed, the President's advisers early in the year estimated the hardcore anti-Reagan vote at 40% of the electorate; that and the fact that more people still identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans seemed to give any prospective opponent a launching pad for a strong challenge.
By luck or design--or surely a combination of both--1984 was simply Ronald Reagan's year. The economy did not slow visibly until the end of the campaign, and even now the significance of that slow down is debatable. The Soviets, seemingly immobilized by yet another change in Kremlin leadership, did not provoke any major incidents. And the glorious Olympics worked for Reagan: it intensified na tional pride and gave birth to the chant of "U.S.A." that later resounded through Republican rallies.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were absorbed in a bitter nomination battle that did not end until June. When they did pick their candidate, it was the one the Republicans had been hoping to oppose. For all his experience and intelligence, Mondale came closest to symbolizing what Reagan incessantly portrayed as "the failed Democratic policies of the past."
Once the campaign proper began, there were only two occasions on which Reagan's big lead seemed in any danger. According to some polls, including Wirthlin's, it nearly disappeared for a few days after the Democratic Convention in July, partly because of excitement over the historic nomination of Ferraro. But if she had much effect on the final vote, it could not be demonstrated from Tuesday's returns. At the end, Ferraro's admirers were reduced to contending that Mondale would have lost even more disastrously with a male running mate.
The Democrats revived only once, immediately after the first Reagan-Mondale debate on Oct. 7. Reagan's rambling and unfocused performance briefly raised the one issue his aides had not prepared to counter: his age and competence. But it lasted only until the second debate, on Oct. 21. The President once more looked confident and vigorous, the slight Mondale rise in the polls promptly reversed itself. Reagan cruised to the finish line.
The question for Reagan--and the nation--now will be how he intends to capitalize on his enormous victory. Some of his advisers plan to urge a round of attention-getting appearances, a sort of post-election campaign, to keep the momentum going. They will also suggest a quick start on putting together a budget and domestic program to deal with the ominous federal deficit, a task that cannot be put off for very long. The President in the early hours of his victory talked about a possible summit with Soviet leaders and even a December trip to Asia.
Fundamentally, though, Reagan has not yet devoted a great deal of thought to his second term and that very fact points to a personal problem that is also a national concern. The President has always been more absorbed in selling his ideas than in setting policy, more comfortable campaigning than governing. But now his campaigning days are over; for the first time in his political life there is no election to look forward to. By judging his presidency a rousing success so far, the voters have in effect given him a standing ovation on Election Day. History will render its verdict according to how well Ronald Reagan confronts the hard job of running the country over the next four years. --By George J. Church. Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale and Laurence I. Barrett and Douglas Brew with the President
*The alltime champs: George Washington got the maximum 69 electoral votes in 1789, and James Monroe in 1820 won 281 electoral votes, to 1 for John Quincy Adams.
With reporting by Sam Allis, Laurence I. Barrett, Douglas Brew