President Jimmy Carter’s administration opened with a palpable sense of promise. He was elected to the presidency during the nation’s bicentennial observance, and in the wake of Watergate and the residual aftereffects of Vietnam, he appeared on the scene as a refreshing antidote to a political system that, for many Americans, had betrayed their ideals and disappointed their aspirations. The newly inaugurated president made every effort to portray himself as a man of the people, and the promise of personal integrity and pragmatic, nonideological leadership was embraced by the American public. In March 1979, three months into his presidency, Carter enjoyed an approval rating of 75 percent, the highest since Lyndon Johnson in February 1964 (only three months after the death of President Kennedy). President Carter’s ratings remained above 50 percent throughout 1977. But moving into 1978, economic problems (high unemployment combined with double-digit inflation—a phenomenon called “stagflation”) weighed on the Carter presidency along with growing concerns over the cost of energy, particularly oil; and from this point, his ratings would fluctuate for the remainder of his administration.
The president had established himself as an important international figure through his role in brokering peace between Israel and Egypt, but these domestic problems dogged his presidency. Liberal Democrats were angry with the president for not cooperating with their efforts to establish a national health program, or at least for not supporting the kind of program that the liberals in Congress desired, as President Carter did in fact support national health care as a policy. Conservatives in both parties felt that Carter was soft on defense and were incensed that he had canceled production of the new-generation B-1 long-range bomber. As the Cold War was still under way, the canceling of such a big-budget item would guarantee controversy.
Carter did not help matters when he spoke of a “crisis of confidence” that had insinuated itself throughout American political culture. It was a well-meaning effort at avuncular frankness toward the American people, but the message was as distasteful as bad medicine and of questionable effect. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” the president declaimed in a nationally televised speech in the summer of 1979. “It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” While the president was merely responding to what pollsters had already observed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the fate of Vietnam, fears of a stagnating economy without respite, and painful memories of the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., the speech appeared too somber, even morose—and it came to be called the “malaise speech” in the press, even though the word “malaise” was nowhere to be found in the actual text of his address. President Carter had promised honesty and candor, and he delivered it; but its ultimate effect was to tint the White House with a shade of resignation, a presidency in the doldrums. While perhaps an overreaction to President Carter’s overall purpose, there was something to the criticism. Past presidents had encountered far worse problems and still managed to deliver stirring, hopeful speeches—examples in recent times included Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy; but in his “crisis of confidence” or “malaise” speech, President Carter inadvertently announced a self-fulfilling prophecy, not about the mood of the country, but more directly about the timbre of his own presidency. Even in the president’s own party, there was enough disgruntlement to throw into doubt Carter’s renomination.
For a brief moment, this changed. When an agitated mob of Iranian revolutionaries, in violation of all standards of international protocol, violently stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held a number of Americans hostage, the president enjoyed a favorable bump in his approval ratings, as is often the case when the nation faces a new crisis abroad. But as the hostage crisis worsened and then reached what appeared to be an impasse, the president was seen by many within the American public as ineffective, lacking the fortitude needed to manage such a crisis. A disastrous rescue effort only punctuated the “crisis in confidence” in President Carter’s judgment, competence, and resolve. Additionally, President Carter’s decision to boycott the Summer Olympic Games, to be held in Moscow, in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan further damaged his popularity in the polls, as it was seen by some as grandstanding, and by others as a futile gesture that would not be taken seriously, something to be dismissed by the emboldened Soviets, who gladly exhibited their indifference to the opinions of the Americans.
Furthermore, discontent brewed within the Democratic Party itself. Liberal Democrats in Congress found it difficult to work with the president, in part due to ideological disagreements but also as a result of irreconcilable personality differences. Thus President Carter lost considerable support throughout the party in the second half of his administration. Rumors circulated that elements in the party wanted to dump Carter in 1980 and replace him with a more visionary, charismatic leader. Many turned back to the Kennedys—in this case, Senator Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy brothers, who had, over the course of the past decade, managed to shake personal scandal to become an esteemed leader in the U.S. Senate. Kennedy’s presidential ambitions had been virtually demolished by the horrible Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, but over the years his position had recovered, and to many within the party, he was the only figure capable of dislodging an incumbent president. However, one poll indicated that Senator Edmund Muskie, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1968, would be a more preferable candidate for the general election. Governor Jerry Brown of California was also a possible candidate to run against Carter for the nomination, but his campaign never received enough traction to be considered a serious threat. It was Kennedy who led Carter 58 percent to 29 percent in an August 1979 poll, and even after a bungled television interview with Roger Mudd of CBS News in which Kennedy awkwardly failed to coherently explain why he felt he should be president, he still held a 49-to-39 lead when pitted against Carter.
The Iran hostage crisis, which would eventually become a principal factor in Carter’s downfall, in its earliest days gave Carter the advantage over Kennedy as the two candidates squared off in the early primaries. Kennedy campaigned hard in Iowa, but Carter won a stunning victory there, to be followed by another convincing win in New Hampshire. Kennedy did manage to win the Massachusetts primary, his home state, but Carter continued to win in subsequent primaries. As the campaign season moved into the summer and the American public grew anxious over the unresolved hostage crisis, Kennedy finally began to win a series of primaries, including a significant victory in New York, always a key state, even though it was no longer the biggest electoral prize (that now being California, thanks to the 1970 census). In the face of Kennedy’s assault, Carter suddenly withdrew from campaigning and adopted the “Rose Garden approach” of remaining in the White House and away from the campaign trail, a decision he explained as stemming from the need to manage the hostage crisis. Carter’s tactic may actually have allowed Kennedy to make late gains, but it was not enough. Going into the convention, Carter’s lead in delegates was too large, and in spite of one final effort to persuade the convention to release all delegates from their prior commitments, the Kennedy campaign was defeated.
President Carter won his party’s renomination (Vice President Walter Mondale also was renominated), but the fight with Kennedy had exposed divisions and discontent within the party that illustrated a gravely vulnerable incumbent. At the convention, Kennedy, in defeat, delivered an eloquent and inspiring speech, considered by many to have been Ted Kennedy’s finest hour, while the president’s acceptance speech fell flat. Carter awkwardly appeared before the delegates, cutting a pale image when compared to Kennedy, and at times his enthusiasm for the upcoming campaign against the Republicans appeared somewhat forced, and it even contained an egregious error in referring to the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, whose memory was honored at the convention, as “Hubert Horatio Hornblower—Humphrey.” As an incumbent, President Carter was in a poor position moving into the general election, and he was to face a formidable opponent.
Ronald Wilson Reagan broke through as a major figure on the national political stage in 1964, owing to a stirring speech delivered at the national convention that eclipsed the party’s nominee, then senator Barry Goldwater. Since that time, Reagan had remained the most visible and popular voice of American conservatism. He nearly dislodged incumbent president Ford in a tight battle for the 1976 GOP nomination, and since that convention, he had remained a visible spokesperson for conservative values and policies. Given his reputation, and in light of his near victory against an incumbent for the nomination four years earlier, Reagan was considered to be far and away the only serious Republican front-runner for 1980, particularly given that Ford himself had decided not to compete for the nomination. This led Reagan’s campaign managers to adopt a policy that set their candidate above the fray, keeping him away from campaign events that they deemed to be of little relevance. However, this approach nearly backfired, as a number of talented candidates then stepped into the field, including several prominent Republicans, among them Senator Robert Dole, the GOP’s vice presidential candidate in 1976; Senator Howard Baker; former governor (and former Democrat) John Connolly of Texas, who had been wounded by a bullet during the assassination of President Kennedy; perennial candidate Harold Stassen of Minnesota; rising moderate congressman John Anderson of Illinois; and former CIA director and diplomat (who had also served two terms in the House of Representatives) George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas.
Bush, who like Anderson was a moderate, soon proved to be the most effective challenger, participating in as many campaign events as possible, leading to payoffs in the polls; he began to actually show better than Reagan in informal and straw polls conducted after events in which Bush had participated. Bush won a straw poll in Iowa, dispelling any illusions that Reagan’s nomination was inevitable. Reagan finally took notice and actively joined the campaign, beginning in New Hampshire, which included a candidates’ forum that was partially funded by Reagan’s own campaign and that was meant to bring together all the current candidates for an open debate. The Bush camp, confident with the momentum (the “Big Mo,” as Bush was wont to call it) it had gained in Iowa, welcomed the debate with Reagan but was caught off guard when the rest of the field, none of whom by this time were serious challengers, also appeared. Wanting to debate Reagan alone and not interested in providing the also-rans with a public stage, Bush’s campaign manager, Howard Baker, promptly advised Bush not to participate, leaving the two front-runners silently stewing on stage while four of the other candidates waited on stage behind them. With the audience confused and fidgeting, Reagan took the microphone to begin to explain his reasons for including all the candidates out of a sense of fairness. At that moment, the debate moderator ordered Reagan’s microphone to be silenced, to which a clearly vexed and roused Reagan forcefully replied, to the vigorous applause of all those present, “I am paying for this microphone!”
Reagan’s refusal to be silenced and the strength he reflexively revealed in the heat of the moment was pivotal; from that point, Reagan commanded all the attention, and the Bush campaign, which had been up to that point successful and well managed, began to look bland by comparison. Reagan won the New Hampshire primary with 50 percent of the vote, with just 23 percent going to Bush. New Hampshire was followed by Massachusetts, which gave Bush and Anderson a tie for first and a narrow two-percentage-point victory over Reagan; but after that, Reagan won six primaries in a row and nearly all of the primaries afterward. Bush ran second in most of these primaries (usually a distant second), and where he did not take second, he either won (just three more primaries after Massachusetts) or finished third to Anderson. At the end of the primary season, Reagan had won nearly 60 percent of the popular vote to Bush’s 24 percent and Anderson’s 12 percent.
Prior to the convention, Anderson’s campaign bolted and established an independent candidacy in an attempt to offer a moderate alternative to Republicans uneasy with Reagan’s conservatism and to Democrats disappointed by Carter’s alleged lack of leadership. Reagan cruised to nomination at the GOP convention, with George Bush invited to join Reagan as his running mate. The Republican platform proposed a significant reduction in federal income tax rates. It also proposed to reduce welfare allocations by “removing ineligibles from the welfare rolls, tightening food stamp eligibility requirements, and ending aid to illegal aliens and the voluntarily unemployed.” The platform refused to either endorse or oppose the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the ratification of which had recently been stifled. Additionally, the platform supported a constitutional amendment “to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children,” supported legislative action to “to restore the right of individuals to participate in voluntary, non-denominational prayer in schools and other public facilities,” and demanded a halt to forced busing of public school students. The platform also opposed any new national health insurance program and supported the transfer of all welfare program functions to the states. One platform plank opposed any federal registration of firearms and supported mandatory sentencing for the commission of armed felonies.
Thus the stage was set for the general election. The Reagan campaign employed a two-prong strategy to convince Americans to deny Jimmy Carter a second term. First, the campaign sought to make the American people comfortable with Reagan as a person and a proven leader. By focusing on the actions of Reagan as governor of California for eight years as well as his leadership in the party, the campaign angled a defense that would prevent the Carter campaign from characterizing Reagan as simply a former actor who knew little about running a government. The slogan “It’s Time for Strong Leadership” reflected this strategy. The second prong forthrightly blamed the Carter administration for not dealing with the serious domestic and foreign policy problems facing the country. Slogans such as “Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?” “Make American Great Again,” and “Together—A New Beginning” sought to persuade American voters that Reagan offered the nation a way out of its domestic and foreign problems. Reagan ads blasted Carter for high inflation, rising energy costs, and foreign policy disasters. Even though Reagan gave few detailed suggestions as to how he would address these problems, his spirited optimism was a marked contrast to the cloud of malaise that had settled over the Carter presidency, and the strategies employed to illustrate this were effective.
The Carter campaign relied upon a three-prong strategy. First, the Carter campaign sought to emphasize his foreign policy achievements—viz., the Camp David accord between Egypt and Israel that he helped broker, and his careful and deliberate responses to dangerous international situations, which helped to prevent the United States from becoming involved in another war. Second, the Carter campaign sought to depict Carter as a hard-working chief executive devoting countless hours to find solutions to the nation’s problems. Third, the Carter campaign sought to depict Reagan as potentially dangerous, a move reminiscent of President Johnson’s campaign against Senator Goldwater in the 1964 presidential contest. Carter campaign ads argued that Reagan, if elected, would shoot from the hip and thus might involve the United States in another unwanted war. Slogans such as “Stand by the President,” “Leadership and Strength,” and “A Solid Man in a Sensitive Job” were designed to convince voters that Carter, after four years managing crises in the White House, was far better prepared to serve as president under strained circumstances than his GOP counterpart.
Following his Rose Garden strategy (reminiscent of the “front-porch campaigns” of the late nineteenth century), President Carter remained in the White House through much of the post-primary phase of the campaign, under the belief that this approach permitted Carter to look presidential and convince voters that it was too dangerous to change presidents in the middle of so many domestic and international problems. But Carter was eventually forced to leave the Rose Garden and face his challenger head-on. Following the precedent set by the campaigns of 1960 (Kennedy-Nixon) and 1976 (Ford-Carter), the candidates agreed to a series of televised presidential debates. As the polls showed the candidates in a tight race, many observers believed that the debates might determine the outcome of the election. Through much of the fall, the Carter campaign had refused to debate Reagan, owing to Reagan’s insistence that third-party candidate John Anderson also be included. Anderson’s numbers in the polls had increased to around 20 percent, a significant amount for a third-party candidate, and Reagan desired to engage him in a national debate. The first debate went as scheduled, but President Carter still withheld, refusing to debate Anderson. While some had anticipated that Anderson, who was a skilled debater and a cool presence under media fire, could get the best of Reagan, quite the opposite resulted; after the first debate, Anderson’s percentage in the polls was halved. The Reagan camp continued to insist on three-way debates, and President Carter continued to refuse. Finally, President Carter managed to persuade Reagan to drop his insistence on including Anderson, and a second debate involving only Reagan and the president was held just one week before Election Day.
Carter was well prepared to deliver complex facts and demonstrate the expertise that he had acquired over the past four years as the nation’s chief executive, but Reagan’s personal charm and sense of vision shined brighter, at least on that one evening. Carter, who often seemed irritated or put-upon, could not match Reagan’s disarming manner and telegenic image. In addition to Reagan’s more comfortable, poised performance, Carter seemed out of his league, a marked contrast to his evident successes on the campaign trail in 1976. Reagan managed to ably deflect any effort by Carter to depict him as “hawkish” or extreme, and when the president focused on Reagan’s domestic policies, the challenger would shrug it off. “There you go again,” Reagan casually responded to Carter’s criticism of Reagan’s past record on entitlement programs, dismissively sweeping away the president’s attempt to depict Reagan as too conservative to trust with “third rail” spending programs and policies. Carter appeared risible when, in debating nuclear weapons policy with Reagan, he shared with the television viewers his “consultation” over the future of nuclear weaponry with his eleven-year-old daughter Amy, a debate moment that fueled many jokes and one-liners on late-night television and helped to generate more than one satirical opinion column. But Reagan’s best moment came at the end of the debate, when in his concluding reflection and with the uncanny timing that he had learned from his years as an actor, he turned toward the viewing audience and asked,
Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to whom you will vote for. If you don’t agree, if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.
If there had ever been a single, defining turning point in any presidential campaign, this was it. Immediately before the debate, the polls indicated the candidates were locked in a dead heat, with some polls showing a slim lead for the president. The following day, after Reagan’s masterstroke, public opinion polls conducted by Carter’s own advisers showed Reagan steadily moving ahead.
Still, the polls leading up to the evening of Election Day predicted a close election, but the pollsters were caught by surprise. Reagan won in a landslide. Even though he managed just 50.7 percent of the popular vote, it was still nearly ten points higher than President Carter, who took only 40.9 percent of the popular vote, with John Anderson winning 6 percent, an impressive amount for a third-party candidate, and the remainder of the popular votes (just over 1%) scattered among a handful of minor-party candidates. More impressively, Reagan won 489 electoral votes (91%) to President Carter’s meager 49 (9%), with Anderson taking none. Carter took only six states and the District of Columbia, Reagan all the rest, winning big in every region of the country including the South (the only southern state that went for Carter was his home state of Georgia). With the GOP’s clean sweep of the South in 1972 and near sweep in 1980, as well as strong showings there in both 1964 and 1968, it was now more than evident that the Democrats’ dominance in that region was finished once and for all. The Reagan election signaled the end of the old Roosevelt Coalition; the Democrats could no longer take the South for granted, lost ground among the labor vote, appeared to be losing ground among Catholics, and found no one region of the country that could get behind the Democratic president. Moreover, it was the worst showing for an incumbent since William Howard Taft lost his bid for reelection in the wild three-way race of 1912 (President Taft actually finished third in a three-way race), and the worst showing in the Electoral College by an incumbent president in any two-way race for reelection (incumbent president Hoover lost by a bigger margin in the popular vote during the 1932 election but finished slightly better than President Carter in the Electoral College).
Given the scope of the loss, some analysts at the time concluded that the country was undergoing, at the very least, what was described as a political “de-alignment,” and possibly what some preferred to call realignment. Most political scientists today reject this assessment, arguing that the election of Ronald Reagan was the inevitable outcome of events already set into motion in the early 1960s. Either way, President-elect Reagan seemed to have pulled the country toward the right, working a kind of reconfiguration of the institutional political arrangements; but once in office, President Reagan would surprise many as a far more moderate figure than most observers could have anticipated.
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Stanley, Timothy. Kennedy v. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010.
Troy, Gil. The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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