And he sweeps a host of new Republican faces into office with him
Landslide. Yes, landslide—stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits and political professionals. After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide. The American voter had struck again. Half the election-watching parties in the nation were over before the guests arrived. The ponderous apparatus of the television networks' Election Night coverage had scarcely got on the air before it was over. NBC called the winner at 8:15 p.m. E.S.T., and the loser conceded while Americans were still standing in line at polling booths in much of the country. In a savage repudiation of a sitting President not seen since F.D.R. swept away Herbert Hoover in the midst of the Great Depression, Americans chose Ronald Wilson Reagan, at 69 the oldest man ever to be elected President, to replace Jimmy Carter in the White House.
It was shortly after midnight when the hamlet of Dixville Notch, N.H., became the first community in the nation to cast its ballots and set a trend that never varied: 17 to 3 for the challenger. Once the big count began, all the shibboleths of the election—that Americans were confused, apathetic and wished a plague on all the candidates and, above all, that they were closely divided—were swept away by a rising tide of votes, some hopeful, many angry, that carried Reagan to victory in one of the most astonishing political and personal triumphs in the nation's history.
Even before the counting began, reporters' interviews with voters leaving the polls made clear that a remarkable Reagan victory was gathering force. That force quickly proved tidal. Some of the first returns came from states that Carter had to win to have any hope at all, and they made it mercilessly clear that the White House would no longer be his. On the tide rolled, through Carter's native South, into the nation's industrial heartland, on to the West, until, reluctantly at the end, even New York fell to the Republicans.
As the tallies piled up, they buried nearly every comfortable assumption that the pundits had made about how Americans would cast their ballots. Among them:
> The growing promise that the American hostages in Iran would be returned—the closest thing to the "October surprise" that the Reagan camp had long dreaded—apparently helped Carter not a bit, and may have cost him dearly.
> Independent Candidate John Anderson did not elect Ronald Reagan by significantly weakening Carter; indeed he had no effect on the election outcome as a whole.
> The huge number of voters who had told pollsters that they were undecided evidently broke decidedly for Reagan, thus confounding the conventional wisdom that disaffected Democrats in the end would "come home" to their party.
> Women, who had been thought particularly susceptible to Carter's charge that Reagan might lead the U.S. into war, did not vote Democratic in anything like the numbers expected.