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Here is an interesting and hopeful article by Craig Keshishian who was on Reagan’s campaign team. He sees similarities between 1980 and 2024. I don't have his level of insider pro insight nor the same degree of optimism. I do recall the reactions as one among the happy crowd at the GOP election night gathering at the Washington DC Hilton on November 4, 1980 and the overall mind-blowing exuberance of that amazing night.
Most people assumed that Jimmy Carter would be re-elected. He had cratered in the polls from double digits to neck and neck, but the experts uniformly assumed that he would eke it out. Complicating the math was independent John Anderson who was the choice for those who considered themselves too clever and sophisticated to vote for either the Georgia rube or the California actor.
I attended the rather unfocused debate in September in Baltimore between Reagan and Anderson (Carter refused to debate with Anderson present). It was fairly dull but Reagan’s people were enthused. The much smaller Anderson overflow crowd was shunted to a side room and did not cheer but occasionally sneered together at some Reagan remark.
I believed at the time that Reagan was destined for a noble effort in defeat. The numbers did not seem to work.
Reagan was spectacular in the one-on-one debate with Carter in October, or so I thought, but there was no social media or cable chatter or the internet to gauge wider opinion. The consensus of elite opinion in the Washington Post (still a real newspaper back then) and on the Sunday talk shows was that it was inconceivable that Reagan could win.
A think tank friend provided entre to the GOP election night gathering at the Washington Hilton. There was a stream of election news and a giant map on the largest screen I had ever seen (it was 1980). I recognized a number of members of Congress, and some recognizable socialites. (I grew up in Georgetown and a few of those folks had even been on my various paper routes 15 years earlier, just so you know how powerfully connected I was at the time.)
Very early in the evening, there was excitement, astonishment, cheers, gasps, screams, hugs as the numbers and the news came on the big TV screen. States were called for Reagan almost instantly, the vote margin large and growing. New York!? Massachusetts? New Jersey?! How was this even possible? Even optimistic political junkies and my Capital Hill drinking buddies had assumed it would be close in their elaborate war-gaming predictions about this or that state while just daring to hope.
Every close Senate race broke our way—even a GOP Senate!! It was all so much better than expected nobody quite knew what to think.
With all due respect to Mr. Keshishian, it is very hard to believe that anything close to that could happen in 2024. Identity politics has made it vastly harder for people to vote against their own party, even with absurdly weak candidates and catastrophically bad policies. Once upon a time, many registered Democrats had no problem electing Nixon and Reagan. However, the margin for change of any kind now seems very small.
More importantly, there is the new cheating-friendly regimen in place. In my younger days, the only expected significant election cheating was Cook County, IL which did not matter in a landslide. Now suspicions of cheating seem to loom larger than inferences from polling data. And why not? The greatly enhanced turnout under COVID rules added many rather loosely verified or unverified people who will likely turn out in larger proportions than real voters. And there are already indications of substantial potential abuses.
- Hennepin County, MN told the unanimous state supreme court to buzz off and that no GOP election judges will be allowed until Election Day despite the unambiguous requirements of state law. A quarter of a million votes are already in the box and beyond challenge so if that provides the margin of fraud, then mission accomplished with the defiant illegal delay.
- Michigan voter rolls are still a notorious mess.
- Maricopa County, AZ has refused to provide their data on voters not verified as citizens—over 200,000 unverified. I think it is highly unlikely that all or even most of the 200,000 are non-citizens but this is exactly the kind of murky mess Democrats prefer, a mess in which some legit voters are held hostage against purges and thus the bogus registrations will survive at least until the election is over.
- In VA, your tax-funded federal lawyers from the DOJ argued in federal court that removing particular, specifically identified, self-admitted non-citizens from the voter rolls was a ‘program to systematically remove’ barred by the 90-day-before election period under federal law. In effect, the lawyers for the American people working at the behest of our esteemed US Attorney General sought to create a precedent to establish an express 90-day safe harbor for any and all openly bogus voter registrations. SCOTUS smacked them down but the DOJ lawyers succeeded in letting it be known that Merrick Garland is not going to investigate much less prosecute election fraud favoring Democrats.
Biden, Pelosi, COVID, harvesting and no borders have erased remaining public confidence in a system that no longer deserves it. Barring a sizeable GOP win and a very determined, sustained public-private effort to clean the rolls, change the rules and reform the process, “our democracy” will continue to drift towards being a farcical rubber stamp for permanent bureaucratic rule.
If people had to make the effort to register with ID and vote in person, Harris would likely have no chance. (See the eye-opening data from the yeoman efforts of @namllit_noD here.) But that is not the reality and why it is not 1980 again as much as I wish it were.
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This is clearly and obviously true.
Which is why we have mail in ballots etc.
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I lost all hope this week when the Registrar of Voters' top official for Lake County Calif told me that it is perfectly okay for any and all individuals who drop off bundles of ballots at Calif's many drop boxes to do this since they have "paperwork" with the ballot holders giving them permission to do this.
So if I notice someone dropping off forty or more ballots, I have to remind myself that this is "approved activity."
This is happening in Georgia, and possibly also in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Colorado. People in those states can feel free to inform me if the drop box phenomena is taking place or not. With Pennsylvannia being a swing state, it could be happening there as well.
If Reagan had faced the ludicrous situation our nation is currently in, he may have lost by a landslide. But luckily he did not face this.
The USA is one of the few Western societies that does not acknowledge that ID is required to cast a ballot and then the paper ballots are to be filled out in pen and are to be counted by humans. Even our neighbor to the north thinks this is the best way to have integrity in elections.
Instead here in the USA, when we election integrity types press the Dem leadership about why they won't go this route, they say right to our faces, "Well we would only need to employ those measures if we were going to cheat. Which we can assure you, we would never ever do."
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I remember 1980 differently. The "experts" knew Carter was in deep trouble, and Democrats had tried to dump him, but he beat Teddy and the party was stuck with him. Anderson, like almost all third party candidates, looked like a big deal in the spring and shrank away to almost no effect on the election. The only real question was, would the voters take a chance on Reagan. Nationally, he was a famous conservative, but unlike Trump '24, Reagan had never been president and it was easy to scare people.
The 1980 race looked neck and neck until the debate, when Reagan pulled ahead.
The country was fed up with Carter. To this day, Democrats don't like to admit that; they like to pretend that Reagan, the silver-tongued orator, talked people into it. Republicans like to pretend that the nation was suddenly convulsed with a wave of conservatism. It wasn't. It just couldn't stand listening to Carter.
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No question that Carter was weak. But the enlightened opinion was that nobody would have enough confidence in the ultra conservative actor governor so Carter would get by.
No one predicted a landslide.
Much like Kamala, Teddy (a) assumed he was entitled to glowing press coverage and (b) was unprepared for some rather obvious questions. Roger Mudd effectively ended the insurgent Kennedy campaign one year before the election. So Carter limped along.
In theory, Anderson should have hurt Reagan more than Carter--he had been a Republican and loathed the rise of the conservative wing. Carter and others initially assumed his enemies were divided to his advantage.
The debate changed everything. It took place only seven days before the election so not enough time to catch a big polling trend or change the outlook of many gurus reluctant to give Reagan credit. Thus an enormous pleasant surprise a week later.
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Old Bathos, I think you've got the right picture about 1980; all I'd do is adjust the contrast knobs a bit. An irony is that the press hated Carter, whereas they merely jeered at madman Reagan. Until primary season started in late 1979, the widespread assumption in the fashionable press was the country was yearning to go left in a big way. Unlike fellow polls-basement dweller Biden, Carter (to be fair) didn't completely cave to the left, which is why they hated him.
It never seems to have occurred to them that scorning Carter in print would end up helping Republicans make a case for Reagan.
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