The year 1980 was a rough one for President Carter. On 4 November 1979 Iranian militants had seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. (Curious how they picked a date exactly one year before the 1980 election. It’s almost as if they understood the symbolic importance of that for Americans. I wonder where they learned this?) The nation initially rallied to Carter, as our patriotic impulses kicked in. (I still remember the Assaholla T-shirts.) Unfortunately, TV news people like Walter Cronkite began a count of how many days our people had been held captive, and every day the drip-drip-drip of that count eroded President Carter’s support. To make matters worse, a rescue mission in April 1980 ended in disastrous failure, with 8 Americans dead. To compound matters, the inflation rate in 1980 was 13.5%. After the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan in July, the former California governor held an enormous polling lead over Carter (something like 30+ points). Catastrophe was surely awaiting.
But Carter and the Democrats fought back hard. By October, the race was neck-and-neck. Reagan had a strong debate performance on 28 October that moved things in his direction. But still, he held only a narrow lead.
But that narrow lead became a huge one in the last weekend before the election.
The Iranian government, on Saturday, 1 November, set impossible conditions for the release of the hostages. (Gee, ahem, I wonder who was urging them to do that?) Suddenly, it was like a quantum wave function resolved itself. The day before the election, Monday, 3 November, a Carter campaign official (a pollster, if I recall correctly) contacted Carter advisor Hamilton Jordan and said, “It’s gone.” “Gone?” replied Jordan in shocked disbelief. The campaign official replied, “It’s going to be a big Reagan victory. By 10, maybe more.”
The next day, Reagan won 44 states and beat Carter in the popular vote 51-41. (John Anderson took most of the remaining eight per cent.) By strange coincidence, the hostages were released the day Reagan was inaugurated.
My point is, we have a chance to turn a narrow lead into a big one. We have a chance to collapse the wave function in our favor here on the last weekend.
The Iowa Selzer Poll is a harbinger of that wave collapse. The Kansas poll by that state’s most reliable pollster that shows Trump ahead by only 5 is another one. I sense that people are more and more getting sick and tired of Trump’s grotesque clown show. Even a lot of conservatives, the traditional kind (not MAGAs) that believe upholding the law is of great importance and that decorum and character count for something, are put off by the dementia-riddled orange fool. If we keep pushing, we can win this whole thing. BIG.
I say we go for it. How about you?
