Some folks in the comments below and elsewhere are contesting my statement that Reagan’s 1980 election was a close one.
Reagan won 43.9 million votes to Carter’s 35.5 million. Anderson won 5.7 million votes. (The electoral map looks much worse, as it usually does.) Certainly not a squeaker like 2000, and not as close as I remember it, but not at all the landslide it’s often recalled as, or that Reagan’s subsequent victory in 1984 really was.
If you look back at the coverage from that year you see that in fact the polls remained much closer till near the very end. The debates were evidently decisive — debates that we discovered a few years later had been seriously tampered with: William Casey had stolen the Carter campaign’s briefing book to prep his candidate. (And then there is the murky matter of the October non-surprise — we’ll almost certainly never know the full story of what did or didn’t happen between the Saudi-friendly Reagan-Bush operators and Iran, but speculation remains strong that they exerted great effort to make sure those hostages stayed hostages till after Election Day.)
In the hazy glow of post-mortem memorials we can delude ourselves that today’s bare-knuckles Republicans are a nastier species than their Reaganite predecessors, but the truth is that dirty tricks have long run in the party’s genes.
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