(5 of 6)
Did the last-minute campaign pleas matter? In fact, did the entire campaign make any difference? In hindsight, the result seemed almost preordained. The election was dominated, first to last, by four Ps: Prosperity, Peace, Patriotism and Personality. An incumbent running at a time of low inflation, rising incomes and employment, and absence of wrenching foreign crises would have been difficult to defeat no matter what. When, in addition, the incumbent happened to be a master television performer adept at stirring feelings of patriotic pride, matched against an often plodding campaigner deeply wounded by a bitter primary fight in his own party—well, the ingredients for a landslide were present from the start.
Perhaps the deepest analysis of the campaign, indeed, is also the simplest: nothing ever happened to shake the sunny optimism and patriotic fervor Reagan has spent four years inspiring. Democrats thundered about the dangers of deficits and a nuclear-arms race, but they never raised serious doubts about Reagan's leadership. The President did not even spell out a program for his second term: it was enough to assert that "America is back, standing tall" and ask crowds repeatedly, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" They invariably roared back "Yes!" They did the same with their votes on Tuesday.
Says Reagan's campaign chairman, Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt: "In modern political history, no one has ever had a firmer base of support over a matter of months. It has been a wall of granite." A Mondale strategist offers the same fundamental analysis. Says he: "The President's favorability rating in the polls stayed at about 60% throughout the election. The voters stayed put."
The outcome did not seem so inevitable at the start of the year, though. Despite his winning personality, Reagan throughout his political career has been a polarizing figure who stirs strong antipathy as well as fervent support. Reagan Strategist Stuart Spencer describes the President as "an ideological incumbent who broke a lot of china as he rearranged the nation's priorities over the course of four years." Indeed, the President's advisers early in the year estimated the hardcore anti-Reagan vote at 40% of the electorate; that and the fact that more people still identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans seemed to give any prospective opponent a launching pad for a strong challenge.
By luck or design—or surely a combination of both—1984 was simply Ronald Reagan's year. The economy did not slow visibly until the end of the campaign, and even now the significance of that slow down is debatable. The Soviets, seemingly immobilized by yet another change in Kremlin leadership, did not provoke any major incidents. And the glorious Olympics worked for Reagan: it intensified na tional pride and gave birth to the chant of "U.S.A." that later resounded through Republican rallies.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were absorbed in a bitter nomination battle that did not end until June. When they did pick their candidate, it was the one the Republicans had been hoping to oppose. For all his experience and intelligence, Mondale came closest to symbolizing what Reagan incessantly portrayed as "the failed Democratic policies of the past."