November 6, 1984, 40 years ago: President Ronald Reagan is overwhelmingly re-elected, defeating Walter Mondale, who had been Vice President under Reagan's predecessor as President, Jimmy Carter. Reagan nearly becomes the 1st candidate to pull off a 50-State sweep, coming closer than Richard Nixon did in 1972, as Mondale wins his home State of Minnesota by just 2,996 votes.
Reagan thus breaks Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1936 record of 523 Electoral Votes, with 525, although it's not quite a higher percentage: FDR got 523 of 531 for 98.5 percent of the EVs, while Reagan got 525 of 538 for 97.6.
Mondale also won the mostly-black District of Columbia, for 3 EVs, but until about 12:00 Midnight, Eastern Time, Minnesota still couldn't be called for him. Or, as comedian Jay Leno put it, "When I went to bed, I only had 3 fewer Electoral Votes than Mondale, and I wasn't even running!"
Mondale also got at least 48 percent of the vote in Massachusetts and Rhode Island; 47 percent in Maryland; and 45 percent in Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York and Wisconsin. Had he won those, instead of losing 525 Electoral Votes to 13, he would have lost 398 to 140, and it wouldn't have looked so bad. But the popular vote was still bad: Reagan won 58.7 percent, Mondale 40.6.
Unemployment was 7.5 percent, higher than the 7.1 percent that it was 4 years earlier when Reagan knocked Carter out of the White House. And there was the Beirut barracks debacle just a year before this election, killing 241 U.S. Marines -- to put it into recent context, 60 "Benghazis" all at once.
And, less than 4 months earlier, Reagan had joked about starting World War III: "We begin bombing in 5 minutes." As a 14-year-old boy, let me tell you: That was terrifying. And, especially in the 2nd debate, Reagan looked like he was already affected by Alzheimer's disease.
So how did Reagan win? By lying: By saying that it was "Morning Again In America," by saying that America was stronger than ever thanks to his defense buildup, by saying that the Communists were in retreat (they weren't), and that he wasn't going to raise taxes but Mondale was. (As Mondale pointed out, Reagan had already raised taxes twice, and would have to do so again -- and, in fact, did.)
But the Republicans ran against "The Carter-Mondale Administration." To this day, they compare every Democratic President, and every Democratic nominee for President, to Carter, even after we've had successful Democratic Presidencies under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Republican Presidents who were much more damaging than Carter in the two George Bushes and Donald Trump -- and, as it turned out, Reagan himself.
Mondale also hurt himself with his selection of a running mate. It is easy to understand his desire to choose the 1st female Vice Presidential nominee: He thought he could take the women's vote away from Reagan. That was probably a bad guess, no matter who he would have chosen.
But Ferraro, then a Congresswoman from Queens, was the wrong woman for the job. The traditional running-mate role, that of the "attack dog" who says things the Presidential nominee shouldn't, worked against her, especially with her N'Yawk accent. The fact that her husband, Brooklyn real-estate developer John Zaccaro, was viewed ethically compromised (even if he really wasn't, and she wasn't, either) didn't help.
But there was nothing Mondale could have done. Reagan was able to have it both ways. He was able to accentuate the positive: The "Morning In America" ad suggested, with much justification, that things were better than they had been 4 years earlier.
It was something that Americans, besieged by a quarter of a century of Cold War, civil rights struggles, race riots, assassinations, war, recession and terrorism desperately wanted to believe. And Reagan and his packagers were able to convince them it was true. This was all part of the Actor's show. He never played any part as well as he played "President Reagan." In short, to adapt a famous line from a TV commercial: Ronald Reagan wasn't a great President, but he played one on TV.
One thing that helped was the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Granted, the hockey Gold Medal, including the upset of the vastly more talented Soviet team, at the 1980 Winter Olympics didn't help Carter (or Mondale, who was actually at the game with the Soviets and the Gold Medal game with Finland, as several players were from Minnesota). But the boycott of the Summer Olympics, in Moscow, sure hurt Carter – even though it did more to expose the Soviets as "an evil empire" than anything Reagan ever did.
When the Soviets and the East Germans boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, it left the American team almost free rein to win as many medals as it wanted. It became 16 days of unbridled, safe patriotism, a call of, "You're all welcome to visit our country, but our country is the greatest!" It was right up Reagan's alley, and it was right in his Southern California backyard. As the host nation's head of state, he even got to officially declare the Games open. He was great at ceremonial stuff like that, and he reveled in it.
But Reagan and his team were equally good at selling the Cold War. In spite of the sunny image he projected for both himself and America, Reagan was able to make Americans so frightened of the Soviet Union that they'd rather have a senile, lying Republican as President than an honest Democrat of sound mind.
There was nothing Mondale could have done. The only way he could have won would have been if Reagan's Alzheimer's disease had made him look obviously impaired during their debates. People who heard his closing statement in the 2nd debate wondered, but it wasn't obvious enough to swing the election.
In spite of his tremendous victory, it was a personal landslide, a.k.a. a "lonely landslide." The Republicans gained 16 seats in the House of Representatives, hardly what one would expect when the President won by such a wide margin. And the Democrats actually gained 2 seats in the Senate. Notable newly-elected Senators included Republicans Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Phil Gramm of Texas; and Democrats Al Gore of Tennessee, John Kerry of Massachusetts, Paul Simon of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.
Reagan died in 2004, Ferraro in 2011, Bush in 2018, Mondale in 2021.
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