Conventional Wisdom
In 1976, Gerald Ford, who had become president when Richard Nixon resigned — and who pardoned Nixon, and who was portrayed as a hapless klutz by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, and who seriously asked Americans to wear pins with the slogan “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) — won the Republican nomination against a spirited challenge by California Governor Ronald Reagan, a conservative firebrand.
Ford won the nomination, but was he actually the stronger of these two candidates for the GOP to run against Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter?
It’s a rhetorical question, because of course there’s no way to know — we can’t turn back time and rerun elections, trying out different nominees.
We do know that when Reagan won the chance in the next cycle to face Carter, Reagan beat him by a landslide, winning 44 states, and control of the Senate flipped to the GOP. But no two cycles are the same: by that time, Carter was an incumbent, not a fresh face, and his job approval ratings were pretty low. It certainly could be that Reagan, just like Ford, would have lost against Carter in 1976, the first post-Nixon presidential election.
Reagan’s case does show that losing a nomination in one cycle doesn’t imply a politician can’t win the nomination in a subsequent cycle — and win the presidency.
Reagan’s victory in ‘80 ushered in a conservative era in U.S. politics that changed the political landscape for decades. In my opinion, an unabashed progressive president who aims to spur on a vigorous progressive movement could usher in a new progressive era. And this potential, as I’ve written before at length, is the major reason, along with his long track record of accomplishment, why I support Bernie Sanders.
Though Republicans today obviously hold Reagan in very high regard, he won that landslide victory in 1980 despite the fact that many folks even in his own party weren’t at all enamored of him. Conventional wisdom on both sides of the aisle held that he was too far outside of the mainstream to win a national election. Voters, it was presumed, always prefer more moderate candidates.
Reality check
New York Magazine (June 2016):
Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican political consultant and Reagan acolyte, has written authoritative books on the presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 that serve as correctives to the sentimental revisionist history that would have us believe that Reagan was cheered on as a conquering hero by GOP elites during his long climb to national power. To hear the right’s triumphalism of recent years, you’d think that only smug Democrats were appalled by Reagan while Republicans quickly recognized that their party, decimated by Richard Nixon and Watergate, had found its savior.
Grassroots Republicans, whom Reagan had been courting for years with speeches, radio addresses, and opinion pieces beneath the mainstream media’s radar, were indeed in his camp. But aside from a lone operative (John Sears), Shirley wrote, “the other major GOP players — especially Easterners and moderates — thought Reagan was a certified yahoo.”
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As Rick Perlstein writes in The Invisible Bridge, the third and latest volume of his epic chronicle of the rise of the conservative movement, both Nixon and Ford dismissed Reagan as a lightweight. … Only a single Republican senator, Paul Laxalt of Nevada, signed on to Reagan’s presidential quest from the start….
Those who doubted Reagan’s chances to win a national election would no doubt have felt justified in their opinion when they saw a Gallup poll, taken in February 1980, nine months prior to Reagan’s landslide victory, showing Carter beating Reagan by 29 points! This was at the start of the Iran hostage crisis, so Carter was benefiting from a rally-round-the-flag effect. But even back in April 1978, when Gallup reported that Carter’s approval rating was underwater (39 to 46), he still was beating Reagan (in a hypothetical match-up) by 4 points.
No wonder so many folks in the GOP establishment figured “yahoo” Ronald Reagan had little chance to win a national election.
When reality comes along and smashes conventional wisdom, the best thing we can do is evolve our thinking to reflect reality.