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Reagan is counting on his own appeal to help him hold on to the West; in fact, there is little chance at the moment that Carter will win much west of the Mississippi. Reagan even has a good chance of making inroads into some former Carter strongholds in the South, such as Louisiana and Mississippi. Republican strategists anticipate doing badly in only one region of the country: the Northeast. Even there Reagan may pick up some electoral votes because of Independent John Anderson. G.O.P. polls now show Anderson siphoning more votes from Carter than from Reagan. Anderson, according to these polls, is actually leading at the moment in four states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, though most Reagan strategists expect this lead to fade by Election Day.
To win the key industrial states, Reagan will have to attract blue-collar voters, who have traditionally been Democrats, as well as independents. This means that he has to break out of his narrow position as a minority-party candidate. Like Carter, he will have to seize the middle. This task is not as hard now as it would have been four years ago. The country has moved toward Reagan's views, but Reagan still needs to move more toward the country's views. His acceptance speech was a strong and very calculated step in this direction.
But Reagan considers his most potent issue to be Carter's weak, vacillating leadership at home and abroad. Says Party Chairman Brock: "If the election focuses on Carter and his record, Carter will lose." Most political experts forecast a bitter campaign with both candidates trying to make each other the chief issue. In an interview with TIME, Texan John Connally predicted: "It will be a campaign of attack, and I think it will wind up very mean. Carter will portray Reagan as a man of little knowledge and less judgment. The Carter people will try to scare the American people about Reagan."
This, in fact, is precisely what Hamilton Jordan, Carter's closest aide, has proposed in a secret memo to the President. Carter is expected to portray Reagan as a Red-baiting, trigger-happy right-winger who would be dangerous in the White House. But Connally professes not to be greatly worried about how Reagan will hold up. Says Connally: "I suspect that Reagan is smarter than any of us think he is. I didn't think it would carry him through the primaries, but it did. He communicates with his constituents, and they fill in the blanks. He leaves a thought with people that they can flesh out."