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Hart plans to stress the "electability issue" in future primaries and with delegates who may be wavering by convention time. "I love to ask these delegates to name me a single state south of the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Mississippi River that Walter Mondale can carry," says Hart Adviser Patrick Caddell. "Their eyes widen with fright. They can't name a single one." The pitch has just one drawback: it is not clear that Hart would do much better. Exit polls in the North Carolina and Ohio primaries revealed voters defecting to Reagan at almost the same rate if Hart gets nominated. Darden's polls reflect that Hart is no more able to be elected in the South than Mondale is. A Los Angeles Times poll published last week showed Reagan beating Mondale 53% to 41%. But the numbers were just as bad for Hart. He would lose to the President 52% to 41%.
Hart's strategists are convinced that a continuing string of Mondale defeats will cripple the front runner before the convention, even if he continues to add to his delegate total. The momentum, they say, is once again with Hart. Hart's aides will snipe away at Mondale's labor ties and seize every opportunity to link his name and record to Jimmy Carter's. They even hope to pin part of the blame on Mondale for the Soviet withdrawal from the Summer Olympics. "I'll be interested in just what his role was in the Olympic boycott in 1980, now that it's been thrown back in our face," coyly wonders Campaign Manager Oliver Henkel. Says another Hart aide: "I hope Mondale says again that he privately led the fight against it, especially since it was his idea." While aides unleash their volleys, Hart himself will press his "campaign of new ideas."
Hart cannot win enough delegates to take the nomination on the first round. Even in a best-case scenario—doubling his 886 delegates—he falls short. His aim instead is to deny a first-round victory to Mondale. At the convention, Hart then hopes to win over uncommitted delegates, woo others away from Mondale, and get still other Mondale delegates thrown out. "It's now a three-ring circus," says Caddell. "The primaries, the delegate battle, and the rules and credentials fights." Hart claims that some 500 Mondale delegates should be disqualified because they were chosen with the help of "delegate committees," groups set up with money mostly from labor political action committees (PACS). Mondale has disbanded these ill-advised committees and even promised to give the money back, but Hart plans to hammer away at the issue. He has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, and he keeps goading Mondale to return the money (which Mondale claims is about $300,000 but the Hart camp hints is at least twice as much). So far, both voters and the press have largely dismissed the delegate-committee squabble as little more than Washington "inside baseball," but it could prove to be a festering sore for Mondale.