The election of 1980 took Ronald Reagan to the White House. It's often identified as a historic election, as a turning point between liberalism and conservatism, as a moment of decline for the Democratic Party and a moment of resurgence for the Republican Party. When we look back on 1980 with the benefit of hindsight, it's tempting to see this election as the moment when America embraced not only Ronald Reagan, but also conservatism and the Republican Party. And yet the election of 1980 itself was much more about the shortcomings of Jimmy Carter, the problems of liberalism, than it was about the successes of Ronald Reagan and the strengths of conservatism. And that was a sharp decline in fortunes for Jimmy Carter, the former Governor of Georgia, a former peanut farmer. Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976, the year of America's Bicentennial, promising to be a different kind of president. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Carter offered something new. He would never tell a lie, he told Americans. Carter stressed that he was an outsider to Washington, something that's always an advantage in American politics, but never more so at that moment when disillusionment with government and politics was at a high point. But when Carter went to the White House, things went wrong for him at home and abroad. The late 1970s proved to be an economically troubled time for the United States, with persistently high levels of unemployment and inflation. By 1980, average family income was 5% lower than it had been when Carter arrived in the White House. Carter faced many setbacks in foreign policy as well. In November 1979, a group of Iranian students took 66 Americans hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran. A year later, when Americans went to the polls, there were still 52 hostages in captivity. The hostage crisis symbolized the limitations of American power overseas during the Carter years. And in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It's something that Carter called the most significant foreign policy crisis since World War II. Clearly an exaggeration, but it was an important event in superpower relations. It killed off Carter's focus on negotiation with the Soviet Union and his effort to create detente. It also pushed public opinion in a more conservative direction on foreign policy. So things went wrong for Carter. And things went so wrong for Carter, in fact, that he faced a serious challenge to his renomination for the presidential candidacy within his own party. He faced a challenge from someone who was seen by many Americans as a politician with great promise to be president, Senator Edward Kennedy, the brother of John F Kennedy and of Bobby Kennedy. On the campaign trail, Kennedy managed to win some successes against Carter, further wounding a president who was already beleaguered. In the end, Carter managed to fend off Kennedy, but that challenge had damaged him. A serious challenge within a party is always damaging to a sitting president. Carter would later say, my main handicap for reelection came from the liberal wing of the Democratic party, mobilized by the Kennedy candidacy. According to his aide, Hamilton Jordan, that challenge from Kennedy was the single critical factor in his defeat. While that was taking place on the Democratic side, on the Republican side there was a crowded field of candidates who wanted to be the Republican to challenge Carter. But more or less from the start, the frontrunner amongst them was Ronald Reagan, his chief rival, George H W Bush. It was a clash between a more conservative Republican in Reagan, a more moderate Republican in Bush. The flashpoint between them was how to respond to America's economic problems. Reagan embraced new thinking on economics that would be summarized as supply-side economics. Meanwhile, Bush viewed that new thinking with skepticism. He called Reagan's ideas voodoo economics. Despite that kind of criticism, when Reagan won he chose Bush as his running mate, as the Republican candidate to be vice president. But Reagan's victory over Bush had shown that the Republican Party was moving in a more conservative direction. And it was a trend to conservatism that alienated some in the Republican Party, enough to spark an independent candidacy from Republican ranks. John Anderson, a Republican congressman from Illinois entered the presidential race against Reagan and Carter. But the American political system makes it hard for such an independent candidacy to gather momentum, and Anderson was no exception. In the end, he was nothing more than a sideshow to the main battle between Carter and Reagan, a battle in which Reagan talked about Carter's shortcomings as president. And a battle in which Carter argued that Reagan's political views were too extreme to merit his election to the White House. Despite that battle, neither candidate, during the campaign, really seemed to energize the electorate as a whole. By the end of the campaign, polls suggested that Reagan was in the lead, but only just. And only one pollster was prepared to predict victory for Reagan. And yet on election day itself, the results were rather more decisive than that. In the popular vote, Reagan won 44 million votes, Carter 35.5 million, Anderson won 5.7 million. Things were even more decisive in the electoral college. Reagan swept 44 states and the Republicans won the Senate for the first time since 1952. So the problems of the late 1970s had created a climate not only for voters to reject Carter, but also to question liberalism and the Democratic Party. As a result, there was a turn to conservatism in 1980, and that would decisively shape America during the 1980s and beyond.
