1984 Elections in the United States

The Event American politicians run for office

Date November 6, 1984

Buoyed by a well-liked and superlatively charismatic incumbent president and by a generally upbeat economic climate in the nation, the Republican Party won its most one-sided presidential election victory of the twentieth century, easily reelecting Ronald Reagan over former vice president Walter Mondale. President Reagan’s coattails, however, did not invariably extend to GOP congressional candidates: The margin of the Republicans’ Senate majority was reduced by two, and the Democrats retained their dominant position in the House of Representatives, although their majority was reduced by sixteen.

Walter Mondale had received his political “baptism of fire” in 1948, as a twenty-year-old operative for Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey’s successful senatorial campaign. He then went on to become a protégé of Humphrey, and both men embraced the liberal ideology of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was particularly popular in traditional Minnesota politics. By 1984, Mondale saw himself as the inheritor of Humphrey’s political mantle, and he had an impressive resume to back up that claim: He had served as Minnesota’s attorney general from 1960 to 1964 and in the U.S. Senate—taking Humphrey’s old seat—from 1964 to 1976. As vice president in the Jimmy Carter administration from 1977 to 1981, he had seen his party go down in flames during the 1980 election to the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush . This emphatic election rebuke and the success of the early Reagan years made Mondale all the more bent on securing the vindication of his political principles by avenging the Democratic Party’s 1980 debacle.

A Republican “Coronation”

There seemed very little doubt that, as a supremely popular incumbent, President Reagan could have his party’s nomination for the asking. In 1983, however, it was not clear that he would choose to do so. Already the oldest serving president at age seventy-three and having barely survived John Hinckley’s 1981 assassination attempt, Reagan was under pressure from some family members to step down while he could still do so with dignity. His age was a potential campaign issue as well. Reagan believed, however, that the Reagan Revolution was not yet complete, and he had lingering reservations about Vice President Bush, who had been his rival for the 1980 Republican nomination and who was significantly more moderate than was Reagan. As a result, the president decided to seek a second term. There was no serious challenge to his decision at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, on August 20-23, which more closely resembled a pageant than a convention. Reagan was unanimously renominated, and, although some slight amount of opposition was expressed to Bush, the vice president was renominated as well, with support from all but four of the delegates.

Mondale’s Challenge

Without an incumbent to seek their nomination, the selection process for the Democrats was much more complicated. Although Mondale was considered the front-runner, he had to compete with several other candidates for the nomination, including John Glenn, the former astronaut and senator from Ohio; former South Dakota senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern; civil rights leader Jesse Jackson; Senator Gary Hart of Colorado; Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina; Senator Alan Cranston of California; and former Florida governor Rueben Askew. None except Jackson or perhaps Glenn seemed likely to enter the race already commanding a substantial base of voters.

In the Iowa caucuses, all went predictably: Mondale garnered 45 percent of the vote and emerged the clear winner. In the New Hampshire primary, however, Mondale was stunned by Gary Hart, who came out of nowhere to defeat him by 10 percentage points. Glenn trailed at a distant third, and Jackson was a more distant fourth. The rest of the field achieved negligible results and was soon out of the picture. Glenn, who had been tabbed by some pollsters as Mondale’s strongest rival, faltered and effectively withdrew after “Super Tuesday,” a day when several important primary elections were held simultaneously. A rather subdued speaker, Glenn experienced persistent difficulties in communicating his message to the voters and was thus unable to motivate a substantial swing in his favor.

Jackson waged a hard-hitting campaign; his revivalist style secured 485 delegates from the South. However, his surge was hampered when anti-Semitic remarks he had made in private were reported in the press. Jackson referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” Because the cornerstone of Jackson’s campaign was tolerance for diversity—advocated by his organization, the Rainbow Coalition—his perceived anti-Semitism seemed to represent the height of hypocrisy, and it cost him votes he could otherwise have won from the party’s more progressive members. Moreover, the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco adopted a set of procedural rules that Jackson believed stacked the deck in Mondale’s favor, eliminating what little chance he had of winning new delegates on the convention floor.

Hart, by contrast, proved a tenacious opponent for Mondale, because he was able to identify himself as representing a new, centrist movement within the party. He claimed that his ability to resist conventional leftist wisdom would strengthen the Democrats’ ability to win the votes of moderates who had deserted them in 1980 to elect Reagan. Hart affected the Kennedy style and appearance and, indeed, presented himself as an updated version of John F. Kennedy, the youngest person to be elected president. However, the Mondale campaign was able to project an image of greater stability and substance in its candidate’s program, and he rallied in the later primaries. At the Democratic National Convention, Mondale prevailed over Hart with 2,191 delegates to the latter’s 1,200. Jackson retained his 485 Southern delegates, but could win no more.

Mondale’s choice of a vice presidential running mate was a calculated gamble. Conventional political wisdom dictated that it should be someone who commanded a significant regional constituency that Mondale lacked, such as Colorado’s Hart, respected Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, or Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Mondale, however, determined upon a more daring course of action: He considered running mates who could deliver a different kind of constituency based on their race, gender, or ethnicity, as well as sending a message of change, diversity, and inclusiveness that would appeal to a broad range of voters throughout the nation. Contenders for the vice presidential nomination therefore included Henry Cisneros, Hispanic mayor of San Antonio, Texas; San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein; Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York; and Los Angeles’s African American mayor, Tom Bradley. (Jackson seems never to have been considered.) Win or lose, Mondale believed, his choice would set a historical precedent and score a major coup against the Republicans, who were beginning to be criticized as the party of old white men.

Mondale ultimately chose Ferraro, who became the first female nominee for vice president of a major political party in the United States. She delivered an effective acceptance speech, and the public-opinion polls indicated a surge in support for the Democratic candidates in the wake of their convention. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket polled at 48 percent, while Reagan and Bush were supported by 46 percent of the voters polled.

Debates and Disaster

The slight advantage enjoyed by the Democrats shortly began to unravel. Mondale’s attempt at candor—admitting that he intended to raise taxes while at the same time accusing the Republicans of hypocrisy on this issue—backfired, and the polls quickly turned against him. Mondale and Ferraro were almost immediately placed on the defensive by a persistent, negative attack campaign orchestrated by Republican political operative Lee Atwater . A rumor, which allegedly originated with Atwater, linked the Ferraro family to organized crime, specifically the numbers racket. The vice presidential candidate was forced to spend the better part of a month responding to recurrent insinuations that she and her husband, John Zaccaro, had Mafia ties and that there were irregularities in their financial records. She devoted a press conference to refuting these allegations on August 21.

In the first of the televised presidential debates, held in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 7, 1984, Reagan, uncharacteristically, stumbled badly. At times he seemed lost, confused, and hesitant. Mondale, though far from overwhelmingly brilliant, was nonetheless the clear winner, and doubts were rekindled concerning Reagan’s age. The vice presidential contenders emerged from their debate on October 11 with a virtual draw, assisting neither campaign. Bush came forward as a bland, even whiney, figure, while Ferraro accused Bush of patronizing her. Her belligerent response to the vice president caused some viewers to see her as defensive and abrasive. The second presidential debate occurred on October 21, 1984, in Kansas City, Missouri. Reagan managed to recapture his stride. He expressed himself well and smoothly, and he even humorously defused worries about his age, saying, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Whatever chances the Mondale campaign might have had were scuttled.

Only the final tallies revealed the full extent to which the disaster predicted for the Democrats had been underestimated. Mondale lost every state in the union, with the sole exception of his home state of Minnesota, and he only won that state by a razor’s-edge margin of 3,761 votes. The District of Columbia, with its predominantly African American population, remained firmly supportive of the Democratic Party. The district’s three electoral votes, however, coupled with Minnesota’s ten, gave Mondale a bare 13 votes in the electoral college. Reagan had 525. The popular vote was 54,455,472 to 37,577,352 in Reagan’s favor; Libertarian Party standard-bearer David Bergland captured 228,111. The Mondale ticket lost among nearly every voting bloc, with the exception of African Americans, who held more tenaciously to Democratic candidates than ever before.

Congressional Elections

The congressional elections were significantly less disastrous for the Democrats. They did lose a net sixteen House seats to the Republicans, but the Republicans had hoped that the landslide of support for the president would translate into a revolution in Congress as well, and that revolution failed to occur. The Democrats, despite their losses, maintained a 253-182 majority and continued to dominate all important committees and key chairs in the institution. They also managed to gain two seats in the Senate, narrowing the Republican majority in that house. Veteran Republican Charles Percy of Illinois, once considered a serious contender for the presidency, suffered a narrow, 2-point defeat at the hands of Paul Simon. Another former presidential aspirant, Howard Baker of Tennessee, retired. In the contest to fill his empty seat, Democrat Al Gore, Jr., outpolled Republican Victor Ashe and independent Ed McAteer by 16 percentage points. Otherwise, the Senate’s incumbents were nearly all reelected.

Impact

Reagan’s campaign slogan, “Stay the Course,” turned the election into a referendum on the current state of the nation, and his landslide victory was represented as proof that Americans were happy with their leadership and the direction in which the country was headed. Mondale’s defeat, meanwhile, represented the defeat of New Deal politics and of the coalition built by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930’s, which made the Democrats the dominant party for much of the period between 1932 and 1968. However, the New Deal was defeated as much by its acceptance as by its resistance. Certainly, Reagan never attempted to do away with Social Security, and in his speeches referencing Roosevelt, he claimed not to be the latter’s opponent but rather the authentic heir to his legacy.

From another perspective, the 1984 election seems to have represented the high-water mark of the Reagan Revolution, when the message of national optimism and prosperity, articulated by a particularly effective spokesman, received an emphatic mandate from an unprecedented proportion of the electorate. It was also the year of greatest strength of the so-called Reagan Democrats, traditionally Democratic blue-collar and lower-middle-class voters who defected in large numbers from their traditional allegiance in order to support Republican candidates. Reagan’s second term would be marked by a decline in popularity and power in the wake of the administration’s embroilment in the Iran-Contra affair, and although Reagan’s ideological investments would continue to define his party and the nation for years to come, they would not in subsequent years be embraced by so sizable a majority of the electorate.

Bibliography

Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Places the 1984 landslide in the context of the events surrounding it and—taking a generally critical view of the Reagan administration—sees the election (especially the Louisville and Kansas City debates) as the zenith of Reaganism, before a decline set in.

Ferraro, Geraldine, with Linda Bird Francke. Ferraro: My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Unique political testament, written shortly after the events and offering invaluable personal insight into the trials of campaigning and the traumatic impact that candidates’ families often endure.

Goldman, Peter, et al. The Quest for the Presidency, 1984. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Written by Newsweek journalists in a journalistic vein, this account attempts to ferret out some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and personalities that affected the election in 1983 and 1984.

Pemberton, William E. Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Stresses the overcoming of Reagan’s disastrous performance in the first debate as being the key event of the 1984 presidential campaign.