1980 United States presidential election

• 1. Introduction

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  On the evening of the 4th of November 1980, NBC News called the presidential race at 8:15 pm Eastern time, before polls had even closed on the West Coast. It was the first time a broadcast network had used exit polling to project a winner, and it caught every other network off guard. By 9:50 pm, Jimmy Carter had conceded, making him the first elected incumbent Democratic president to lose reelection since 1888. Ronald Reagan, the former California governor whom Carter's campaign had called a dangerous right-wing extremist and a reckless war hawk, had just won 489 Electoral College votes to Carter's 49.

  How did a nation arrive at that outcome? What drove a sitting president, riding a brief wave of public sympathy, all the way to one of the most lopsided defeats in modern American history? And what did the voters who chose Reagan actually believe they were choosing? This is the story of an election that many historians have called a political realignment.

• 2. A Nation Under Pressure

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  Throughout the 1970s the United States lived through stagflation, a combination of low economic growth, high inflation, high interest rates, and intermittent energy crises. By October 1978, Iran, then a major oil supplier to the country, was in the grip of an uprising that badly damaged its oil production. In January 1979, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ended a fourteen-year exile in France and returned to establish an Islamic Republic largely hostile to American interests.

  By the summer of 1979, gas lines had returned to American cities, last seen just after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Carter's pollster Pat Caddell told him the public faced a crisis of confidence rooted in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, and Watergate. On the 15th of July 1979, Carter addressed the nation on television and spoke of what he called a "crisis of confidence." The speech became known as the Malaise speech, though Carter never used that word in it.

  When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, Carter cut off American grain sales, annoying farmers at home while hurting Soviet consumers abroad. He also began secret support for rebel forces in Afghanistan, a move that tied down the Soviet army for a decade. The practical effect was to end detente and reopen the Cold War.

• 3. The Hostage Turning Point

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  On the 4th of November 1979, exactly one year before election day, Islamist students and militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages. Carter's measured response initially earned him a surge in approval ratings into the sixty-percent range in some polls, a classic rally-round-the-flag effect. The crisis appeared to give him an opening against a Democratic primary challenge that had been building for months.

  Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had been expected to formally announce a challenge in early November. A television interview with Roger Mudd of CBS a few days before the announcement went badly; Kennedy gave what was widely described as an incoherent and repetitive answer to the question of why he was running. Polls that had shown him leading Carter 58 to 25 in August tightened to 49 to 39 afterward. Kennedy was also carrying damage from the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, a controversy that had led him to pass on running in both 1972 and 1976.

  The hostage crisis that had briefly rescued Carter's standing became a weight around his neck as it dragged on. On the 25th of April 1980, a military rescue attempt ended in disaster; eight servicemen were killed. After that, Carter bore the full political cost of the crisis. Followers of Khomeini burned American flags, paraded captured hostages in public, and burned Carter in effigy. By the time autumn arrived, the ongoing standoff in Tehran had become, in the words of writer David Frum, a symbol of American impotence.

• 4. Reagan's Road to the Nomination

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  Ronald Reagan had come close to denying Gerald Ford the Republican nomination in 1976, and by 1980 he was the clear front-runner. He systematically drove rivals from the field: Senate minority leader Howard Baker of Tennessee, former Texas governor John Connally, Kansas Senator Robert Dole, Illinois Representative Phil Crane, and Illinois Representative John Anderson, who departed the primaries to run as an independent. George H. W. Bush from Texas posed the most durable challenge, winning the Pennsylvania and Michigan primaries, but could not turn the tide. Reagan received 7,709,793 votes in the primaries.

  At the Republican National Convention in Detroit in July, Reagan won the nomination on the first ballot and then named Bush, his principal rival, as his running mate. The choice had a certain elegance: Bush had served as director of central intelligence and brought foreign-policy experience Reagan lacked. Three of the men who competed for the 1980 Republican nomination would go on to top the ticket in the next four elections: Reagan again in 1984, Bush in 1988 and 1992, and Dole in 1996.

  After the primaries ended, a Gallup poll found Reagan ahead among voters, with 58% saying they were upset by Carter's handling of the presidency. One subsequent analysis concluded that both Carter and Reagan were viewed negatively by a majority of the electorate, which helps explain why the general election became, in large part, a referendum on the incumbent rather than an embrace of the challenger.

• 5. Promises and Fault Lines

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  Reagan's campaign platform rested on three pillars: a restoration of military strength, supply-side economic policy, and a balanced budget within three years, which he said would be "the beginning of the end of inflation." He promised a 30% reduction in tax rates over those same three years. At the same time, 60% of Americans polled said they believed defense spending was too low, a number that aligned neatly with his message.

  He also targeted Carter's "windfall profit tax" on domestic oil, arguing the tax was not actually a tax on profits but on the difference between price-controlled prices and market prices, and he pledged to seek its repeal. In one memorable formulation, Reagan described the difference between a recession, a depression, and a recovery by reference to whether Carter himself had lost his job.

  The ERA created an unexpected fault line. Carter was the only major-party candidate supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. After an internal convention fight, Republicans dropped their forty-year endorsement of the ERA. Reagan responded by pledging to appoint women to his cabinet and to name the first female justice to the Supreme Court, and by promising to work with all fifty governors to combat discrimination against women through other means. Some Christians expressed skepticism of Reagan's background as a twice-married former Hollywood actor with a liberal record on abortion and support for no-fault divorce as governor. In the end, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority is credited with delivering two-thirds of the white evangelical vote to Reagan, aided by a reported ten-million-dollar radio and television advertising campaign that Falwell's group ran in the South.

• 6. The Debates and Their Aftermath

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  Carter refused to share a debate stage with John Anderson; Reagan refused to debate without him. The result was that the League of Women Voters held a debate on the 21st of September 1980, at the Baltimore Convention Center featuring only Reagan and Anderson. Anderson, widely expected to dispatch Reagan easily, managed only a narrow win in the judgment of the media. Reagan performed far better than anticipated. Anderson had been polling above 20% in some surveys and was still above 10% at the time of the debate; within weeks he had fallen to around 5%.

  The standoff over a three-way versus two-man format cost the campaign its second scheduled debate and canceled the vice presidential debate. Two weeks before election day, Reagan's team agreed to all of Carter's conditions. The final face-off was held on October 28 in Cleveland, Ohio, and drew one of the largest television audiences of the decade.

  Carter tried to paint Reagan as a reckless war hawk, but it was Carter's own remark that dominated post-debate discussion. He said he had consulted his twelve-year-old daughter Amy on what the most important issue was, and she had answered "the control of nuclear arms." The line became fodder for late-night television. When Carter attacked Reagan's voting record on Medicare and Social Security, Reagan responded with a quiet, audible sigh and the phrase "There you go again." In his closing remarks, Reagan asked viewers whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier. After trailing Carter among registered voters before the debate, Reagan moved into a three-point lead among likely voters immediately after it.

• 7. The Results and What They Meant

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  Reagan carried 44 states and 489 Electoral College votes; Carter won six states and Washington, D.C., for a total of 49 electoral votes. Reagan took 50.7% of the popular vote to Carter's 41.0%. John Anderson won 6.6% of the popular vote but no states; his best showing came in Massachusetts, where he won 15% of the vote, and he performed worst in the deep South, falling below 2% in South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Libertarian nominee Ed Clark received 921,299 popular votes, just over 1%.

  Carter's loss was the worst by a sitting president since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt by 18 points in 1932. His 49 electoral votes were the fewest won by an incumbent since William Howard Taft took eight in 1912. Republicans also recaptured the Senate for the first time since 1954. NBC had projected Reagan the winner at 8:15 pm Eastern, before West Coast voting ended; Carter conceded at 9:50 pm, drawing anger from Speaker Tip O'Neill, who said the early concession weakened Democratic performance in Senate races.

  Post-election research found the landslide reflected a repudiation of Carter more than an endorsement of Reagan's conservative vision. Reagan won 53% of the vote in reliably Democratic South Boston, a data point that became shorthand for the so-called Reagan Democrat. At 69, Reagan was the oldest non-incumbent to win a presidential election up to that point; thirty-six years later, Donald Trump surpassed that record at 70. The election was the last time a Republican won the presidency without carrying Georgia, and it was the first time Massachusetts had voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1956.