1 Jan 1980 Jahr - Election of 1980

Beschreibung:

Reagan coalition: Supporters of Ronald Reagan, including core Republican Party voters, suburbanites and Sunbelt migrants, blue-collar Catholics, and a contingent of southern whites (a key Democratic constituency).

Moral Majority: A political organization established by evangelist Jerry Falwell in 1979 to mobilize conservative Christian voters on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president


Reagan Democrats:Blue-collar Catholics from industrialized midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois who were dissatisfied with the direction of liberalism in the 1970s and left the Democratic Party for the Republicans in the 1980s.



President Carter’s sinking popularity made him vulnerable in the presidential primaries. After Democrats barely renominated Carter over his liberal challenger, Edward (Ted) Kennedy of Massachusetts, his approval rating was historically low: a mere 21 percent of Americans believed that he was an effective president. The reasons were clear enough: millions of citizens were feeling the pinch from stagnant wages, high inflation, crippling mortgage rates, and an unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent — in the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, in contrast, unemployment stayed between 3 and 5 percent and only once climbed above 6 percent. In international affairs, the nation saw Carter’s responses to Soviet expansion and the hostage crisis as ineffectual and weak.

With Carter on the defensive, Reagan struck an upbeat, decisive tone. “This is the greatest country in the world,” Reagan reassured the nation in his warm baritone. “We have the talent, we have the drive…. All we need is the leadership.” To emphasize his intention to be a formidable international leader, Reagan hinted that he would take strong action to free the Tehran hostages if elected. To signal his rejection of liberal policies, he also declared his opposition to affirmative action and forced busing and promised to “get the government off our backs.” Most important, Reagan effectively appealed to the many Americans who felt economically insecure. In a televised debate with Carter, Reagan asked working-and middle-class Americans a powerful question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

In November, the voters gave a clear answer. They repudiated Carter, who won only 41.0 percent of the vote. Independent candidate John Anderson garnered 6.6 percent (with a few minor candidates receiving fractions of a percent), and Reagan won with 50.7 percent of the popular vote (Map 29.1). The Republicans elected thirty-three new members of the House of Representatives and twelve new senators, which gave them control of the upper chamber for the first time since 1954. The conservative landslide finally brought the New Right to national power — and signaled the arrival of a new political alignment.

A color-coded United States map shows electoral, popular, and percent of popular votes received by the presidential candidates during the Presidential Election of 1980.
MAP 29.1 The Presidential Election of 1980

Ronald Reagan easily defeated Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, taking 50.7 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41.0 percent and winning the electoral vote in all but six states and the District of Columbia. Reagan cut deeply into the traditional Democratic coalition by wooing many southern whites, urban Catholics, and blue-collar workers. More than five million Americans expressed their discontent with Carter’s ineffectiveness and Reagan’s conservatism by voting for Independent candidate John Anderson, a longtime Republican member of the House of Representatives.

By the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, conservatism commanded wider popular support than at any time since the 1920s. As the New Deal Democratic coalition continued to fragment, the Republican Party gained voters who had been reliably Democratic since the Great Depression — which accelerated the realignment of the American electorate that had begun during the 1960s. Conservatism’s ascendancy did more than realign the nation politically. Its emphasis on free markets, low taxes, and individual success shaped the nation’s culture and inaugurated an era of individualism. Reagan exhorted Americans, “Let the men and women of the marketplace decide what they want.”

EXAM TIP
Be able to explain the political realignment associated with the leadership of Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan Coalition
Reagan’s decades in public life, especially his years touring the country and meeting with ordinary Americans as a national spokesman for General Electric, taught him how to articulate conservative ideas in easily understandable aphorisms. Speaking against the sprawling government that was a hallmark of the New Deal and Great Society, Reagan said, “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” In a humorous version of the same sentiment, the president joked that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

A photo shows President Reagan at his ranch cutting a tree with a chainsaw.
VISUAL ACTIVITY

President Reagan at His Ranch in Southern California

Images of Reagan quickly became vital for the White House to deliver its message of conservative reform to the American people. This photo was taken by a White House photographer.

READING THE IMAGE: How is Reagan dressed in this photograph, and what does he appear to be doing? What is conveyed symbolically by his clothes and his demeanor?

MAKING CONNECTIONS: How would a photograph like this have contributed at the time to Reagan’s public image as a champion of conservatism? To what degree does this example of propaganda illustrate continuity and/or change in American identity?

Under Reagan’s leadership, the core of the Republican Party remained the relatively affluent, white, Protestant voters who supported balanced budgets and limited government, feared communism, and believed in strong national defense. Reagan’s version of republicanism also attracted middle-class suburbanites and migrants to the Sunbelt states who endorsed the conservative agenda of combating crime and limiting social-welfare spending. Suburban growth in particular benefitted conservatives politically. The flight to the suburbs reinforced preferences for white racial homogeneity and protecting the private home, both of which inclined the residents of suburban cities toward conservative public policies.

This emerging Reagan coalition was joined by a large and politically vital group that had been drifting toward the Republican Party since 1964: southern whites. Reagan capitalized on the “southern strategy” developed by Richard Nixon’s advisors in the late 1960s. Many southern whites had lost confidence in the Democratic Party for a wide range of reasons, but one factor stood out: the party’s support for civil rights. When Reagan came to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to deliver his first official speech as the Republican presidential nominee, his ringing endorsement of “states’ rights” sent a quiet but unmistakable message: he was validating twenty-five years of southern opposition to federal civil rights legislation. Some of Reagan’s advisors had warned him to avoid Philadelphia, the site of the tragic murder of three civil rights workers in 1964, but Reagan believed the opportunity to launch his campaign on a states’ rights note was too important. After 1980, southern whites would remain a cornerstone of his coalition.

The Religious Right proved crucial to the Republican ascendance as well. Falwell’s Moral Majority claimed that it had registered two million new voters for the 1980 election, and the GOP platform reflected its influence. Their proposed agenda called for a constitutional ban on abortion, voluntary prayer in public schools, and a mandatory death sentence for certain crimes. Republicans also demanded an end to court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in schools, and, for the first time in forty years, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Increasingly, republicanism and conservatism were inseparable.

Reagan’s broad coalition attracted the allegiance of another group alienated by the direction of liberalism in the 1970s: blue-collar voters, a high number of Catholics among them, alarmed by antiwar protesters, feminism, and rising welfare expenditures. Some observers identified these voters, which many called Reagan Democrats, with the “silent majority” that Nixon had swung into the Republican fold in 1968 and 1972. Many lived in heavily industrialized midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois and had voted Democratic for decades. Reagan’s victorious coalition thus drew on a revival of right-wing conservative activism and broad dissatisfaction with liberal Democrats — a dissatisfaction that had been building since 1968 and was only briefly tempered by backlash to Watergate.

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