United States presidential election of 1980

The Republican nomination

A onetime movie star and president of the Screen Actor’s Guild (1947–1952), Reagan was originally a Democrat but turned to the Republican Party and was elected to the first of two terms as governor of California in 1966. He tried unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1976, and by the time of the 1980 election he had been stumping in one forum or another for that election for nearly four years. By late 1979 the list of Republican hopefuls had swelled to include Senators Howard Baker (Tennessee), Bob Dole (Kansas), and Lowell Weicker (Connecticut); Representatives John Anderson and Philip Crane (both of Illinois); former Treasury secretary and Texas governor John Connally; and former representative and Central Intelligence Agency director George Bush.

As the campaign developed, Reagan’s most serious opposition came from Bush, who won support from moderate Republicans worried that Reagan’s conservatism might alienate the broader electorate. Bush won victories in the Iowa caucuses and in the Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Michigan primaries, but it quickly became evident that Reagan could not be stopped. The contest between Reagan and Bush was sometimes tense, with Bush declaring that his opponent would have to practice “voodoo economics” in order to increase federal revenue by lowering taxes. In a debate in Nashua, N.H., personal animosity between Bush and Reagan erupted in public. A debate between the two was set up by the Nashua Telegraph, but it was considered to violate Federal Election Commission rules by excluding the other candidates. Only three chairs were set up on the stage—for Bush, Reagan, and a moderator. Reagan offered to pay for the other candidates to participate, and he brought to the stage Anderson, Baker, Crane, and Dole. The moderator, Jon Breen, laid the ground rules for the debate, saying that the four other candidates would not be allowed to speak until after the formal debate between Bush and Reagan. When Reagan attempted to protest, Breen called for his microphone to be cut off, to which Reagan responded, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic].” He then left the stage with the other candidates, ostensibly in protest at Bush. Bush eventually abandoned his campaign for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in May 1980 and threw his support behind Reagan.

By the time the Republican nominating convention began in Detroit, the only real suspense surrounded the identity of Reagan’s choice as his running mate. Would Reagan extend an olive branch to the party’s moderates by asking one of their own to join him on the ticket? Or would he strive for ideological “purity”? The first clue came in one of the more bizarre episodes of recent U.S. political history, when Reagan flirted with the idea of choosing former president Gerald R. Ford, whose moderate credentials were considered sound. As the complexities of having a former president in the second spot became evident, however, Reagan turned to Bush. The move may have irritated some conservatives at first but did no lasting damage to Reagan.

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The Democratic nomination

Most incumbent presidents avoid having a challenger to their renomination, but Carter received opposition from Sen. Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother of the late Pres. John F. Kennedy. As Carter’s standing in the public opinion polls plummeted in 1978 and 1979, thanks largely to his failure to solve the country’s economic woes, Kennedy was widely seen as the logical Democratic alternative. Yet when the senator from Massachusetts finally declared his candidacy late in 1979, his freewheeling brand of liberalism and his role in a fatal incident at Chappaquiddick, Mass. (when the car he was driving ran off a bridge, killing Mary Jo Kopechne, his passenger), caused many voters to have serious doubts about him. Carter and his aides played upon those doubts with considerable skill. Kennedy was also hurt by his rambling, incoherent answer to a seemingly simple question posed by reporter Roger Mudd of CBS News: “Senator, why do you want to be president?”

The Carter camp was unquestionably aided during the primaries by the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran, which began on Nov. 4, 1979, exactly one year before the general election. Followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had toppled the shah of Iran in 1978, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehrān, protesting the shah’s admittance to the United States for treatment of an ultimately fatal cancer condition. Dozens of Americans who were inside the embassy at the time were taken hostage. Some were later released, but more than 50 remained hostages throughout 1980, despite an abortive rescue operation ordered by Carter. It is axiomatic that Americans rally around a president in times of international crisis, and that was precisely what happened during the Democratic primaries, to Kennedy’s obvious and outspoken chagrin. Kennedy victories in a number of key states, including New York and California, were unable to stave off the inevitable. Although Kennedy did not have enough delegates to win the convention, he tried, unsuccessfully, to “open” it in an attempt to win the nomination. Ultimately Carter, along with Vice Pres. Walter Mondale, was renominated at a fractious Democratic convention in New York City that was punctuated by Kennedy’s avoidance of shaking Carter’s hand on the podium.