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The Teeter survey, to be sure, must be balanced against less impressive showings. The latest Harris poll puts Reagan narrowly ahead of Carter, 39% to 34%, with John Anderson at 24%. In one Gallup poll, in which only 26% gave Carter highly favorable ratings, the comparable figure for Reagan was 23%, suggesting that Reagan may have quite a job convincing people he is more capable than Carter. A series of Gallup surveys conducted from April through June showed that 38% of the Republicans in New England and 42% in the Middle Atlantic states would vote for either Carter or Anderson over Reagan. Such a defection of members of his own party poses a serious threat to Reagan no matter how many Democratic votes he picks up. On the other hand, given Carter's increasing weakness in the South and Southwest, it would be possible for Reagan to win without capturing any of the Northeastern states.
On the basis of the Teeter figures, the G.O.P. hopes for dramatic gains in Congress. There is an outside chance of winning control of the Senate, where the party now has 41 seats. There is only a faint possibility of securing a majority in the House, where the Democrats outnumber their rivals 275 to 159. But if the G.O.P. takes a fair number of seats, it would be in a position to control both chambers in 1982, for the first time since 1954.
The numbers favor the Republicans in this year's Senate elections. Of the 34 seats being contested, 24 belong to Democrats, ten to Republicans. Moreover, several of the Democrats are liberals bucking a conservative trend. The Republicans are anticipating a net gain of three to six seats, enough to give the Senate a more conservative outlook. That could also be true of the House, where from 20 to 40 seats are expected to switch from Democratic to Republican.
Looking to November, Reagan is mapping out a strategy to capture as many Democratic and independent votes as possible. As a former Democratic activist who did not become a Republican until 1962, he has always been fascinated by the New Deal coalition put together by Franklin Roosevelt. He wants to build a similar coalition in opposition to the welfare state created by F.D.R. "If you look back," Reagan told TIME, "you find that those great social reforms really didn't work. They didn't cure unemployment. They didn't solve social problems. What came from them was a group of people who became entrenched in Government, who wanted social reforms just for the sake of social reforms. They didn't see them as temporary medicine as most people saw them, to cure the ills of the Depression. They saw them as a permanent way of life."
Reagan is careful, however, not to attack such New Deal programs as Social Security and unemployment insurance, which are now taken for granted and have large constituencies. There are prudent limits to his assault on Big Government. That is the lesson of the 1964 disaster, when Goldwater went down to resounding defeat after a defiantly conservative campaign that included talk of abolishing the Tennessee Valley Authority.
To build a successful coalition for the campaign and possibly for the future, the Reagan forces are targeting three groups, most of whose members voted for Carter in 1976: