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A good part of what we need to know of the larger puzzle will take many weeks to analyze. It is buried not just in the size but in the structure and the texture of Tuesday's vote totals.
The structure of the vote in the South, for example: Did it say that the Republican Party, born to free the blacks, has been accepted there as the guardian of the whites? If so, then a major step in the realignment of U.S. politics has taken place. In the suburbs, did homeowners decisively join in Reagan's victory, or did they split, by ethnic origins, to give a significant share to Mondale? Did working-class Catholics sway to their church's leadership—or to their union leaders?
Much will depend on how Ronald Reagan interprets the vote. Landslides give Presidents enormous authority, but they can lead either to disasters, as did the landslides of Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, or to profound redefinitions of American life, as Franklin Roosevelt engineered. Of course, squeakers too can change American life, as Lincoln and Kennedy proved. What is critical in both landslides and squeakers is the ability of a President to read the tides, the yearnings that went into his victory, to distinguish between his own campaign rhetoric and the reality he must force his people to face.
Issues of substance lie on the table of presidential action. Ronald Reagan had a neat, three-sided diagram of the future in his first election: to reduce inflation, re-establish U.S. defense and balance the budget. But the triangle would not join, and through the gap in its apex, there ballooned a budget deficit of terrifying dimensions. His first stated order of business is to face that problem with sweeping tax revision. One of Reagan's greatest achievements in his first term was to bring into being a bipartisan commission that finally put Social Security on firm footing. One may expect him next to choose an even more imposing group to work on the budget deficit until both parties can, unhappily but necessarily, compromise.
With reelection, Reagan has been handed enormous authority to make the Soviets face U.S. strength and truly negotiate, with some hope of realism on both sides. What is less sure is whether his victory will give him sufficient new vigor to reorganize his discordant White House staff, his Cabinet and his Pentagon.
More important than anything else is how an aging but renewed Ronald Reagan reads his own country. Every great President has been a great politician—Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy—even George Washington, who lived before the age of party politics. They could tell by political instinct how far and how fast they could lead their own people. This will be the test of a second Reagan Administration: its reading of the forces that underlay its election.
Reagan will probably be forced to recognize the pressure of women, but not as a dogmatic group, rather as individuals displaying talents hitherto unused. Both women in the outgoing Senate were Republicans, so were nine Representatives, so were two Cabinet members (three if you count Jeane Kirkpatrick, at best a nominal Democrat).