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.