Ronald Reagan’s victory, 1980 - 7 November 1980

In the presidential election of 1916 the Democrats did what the party whose man is in the White House, always does – it re-nominated the incumbent.

He was President Wilson. The Republicans chose an associate justice of the Supreme Court, one Charles Evans Hughes, a graceful, bearded man with a striking resemblance to God, as he was perceived in those days. Apart from his presidential physique, Hughes appeared to have united his own party and the Progressives in a suspicion that Woodrow Wilson was preparing the country to enter the First World War.

On election night, when the word came in that Hughes had carried the two most popular states, New York and Pennsylvania, and Indiana – the bellwether of the midwestern vote – it was clear that he had been elected. Wilson went to bed a defeated man. And next day, he began to make the necessary arrangements for the transition, the transfer of power. True, California had not been heard from, but California was not, in those days, the giant of the electoral college.

Two nights later, shortly after midnight, the telephone rang in the home of Justice Hughes. It was a news agency reporter wanting to speak to the justice. A sleepy butler answered, "I am sorry sir, the president has gone to bed". Said the reporter, "Well wake him up. And tell him he’s not president any more". It was true – California had gone for Wilson, and tipped the scale. It took three days though, to be sure of it.

Last Tuesday evening at a quarter to six, three hours before the polls had closed in California, the telephone rang in Mr Reagan's house in Pacific Palisades, a lush movie-star colony that lies between Beverly Hills and the Pacific ocean.

The call came from President Carter – he was calling to concede defeat and congratulate Ronald Reagan on a fine victory. How could this be, before the polls had closed in most western states and several in the midwest. Losers always grind their teeth and wait and wait, usually until the early hours of Wednesday. But Jimmy Carter, with one dying kick, set up one new record. No presidential loser has ever conceded so early.

Now, of course the states don’t report their vote as a whole – it’s the election districts, the hundreds of them within a state, that make their tally separately. And in the cities, especially where the mechanical voting machine is long established and accumulates the total as it goes, the votes of even very populous districts can be delivered within minutes of the polling deadline.

This nearly universal device would not, however, be enough to tell us on the basis, say, of 5% of the states vote, who had carried that state. But, for over 30 years now, we have been living in the age of what we first called the "big brain" and now called a computer.

I remember many years ago going into midtown Manhattan to look at IBM’s first demonstration model of the "big brain", an electronic marvel, an enormous room with winking lights and walls riddled with looping wires, an electronic spaghetti factory. Today ,the Japanese have reduced these marvels to the size of a fingernail.

Put together the voting machine and the computer and plug them into a television network and you have a lightning reporter who can be guaranteed to short-circuit the suspense that used to keep us on a knife edge of anxiety through the long evenings and the nights of the first Tuesday in November.

Last Tuesday night was unreal. You have friends in for a drink or two and time to hear the seven o’clock news which on presidential election nights starts the non-stop coverage of the networks. Normally, for many years, the seven o’clock news provided one unchanging item, that produced a ribald joke or two about the networks with all their electronic gear and their maps and their experts dripping expertise.

Seven o’clock strikes and this mountainous organisation groans and delivers as mouse. The first return, always from the same village in New Hampshire, total vote: 11. I remember in 1948 the anchorman saying, "Eight votes for Dewey, three for Truman. Well there it is, but I guess you could hardly call it a trend." After that we would all chuckle through the delivery of several other mice, and go into dinner and come back about ten o’clock, when you could begin to get some idea of how the eastern states had gone, and the midwest was going.

Not last Tuesday. NBC, which admittedly has a bolder profit than its rivals – maybe its big brain is bigger or more audacious – NBC positively gave Florida to Reagan within fifteen minutes of the start of the programme. On the basis of 10% of the vote in a crucial county here, and 5% of a divided city there, NBC was announcing, at 7.30, that Ronald Reagan was going to have a very considerable victory.

They switched to their reporter at the White House and it might have been Wednesday noon. She reported bleak faces, the president's aides looking forlornly at their cluttered desks, and one or two of the Carter family close to tears. A few minutes later a couple of our friends arrived and the man said, "Can we still have dinner?".

Before we finished dinner a brave cheer went up from the telly and there was Jimmy Carter telling us he’d called Governor Reagan and promising us the smoothest transition from one administration to another in the history of the presidency. All that happened then was the rapid and unhindered movement of the landslide, first in the south, and then through the midwest then into the north-east, and finally, across the west to make the map one sheet of uniform blue.

A week ago, it seemed to some of us, though that was no time for me to say so, that the so-called presidential debates had given the last flick of the whip to a Reagan whose sprint in the last stretch was unapproachable. If, in the famous first debate in 1960, John Kennedy looked like a knowledgeable choir boy, and Richard Nixon like Boris Karloff, in the 1980 debate it seemed to me, Ronald Reagan looked like an affable salesman and Jimmy Carter like a nervous iceberg.

It may not seem like much of a choice for the leader of the free world, but one fact we have to face from now is that the television image of two political opponents is not a human reflection of two political positions. It’s a show all in itself, like a studio photograph of a bride, or the commissioned portrait of a university president, or a bank manager. It's undoubtedly meant to be the man himself but he’s tamed and tailored by the medium into a performer.

From this limited and theatrical view of the two candidates, we did not see anything in Jimmy Carter that we had not seen a thousand times. He was brave, judicial, verbose in a technical way, he licked his lips, he trusted as a debater, to misreading some of Mr Reagan’s acts as governor of California and he kept on calling him dangerous.

But then we’d look across to Mr Reagan who is a professional, a professional good guy, in front of a camera, and the last thing he appeared was dangerous; he appeared engaging, good humoured, his brow wrinkled sorrowfully at Mr Carter's misinterpretations. He recited, in the idiom of ordinary Americans speech, his devotion to peace, to the workers, to the families of America, he longed for the old days, of decent folk and lots of jobs.

And he clinched this simple appeal to half the population with the sunny but deadly question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago? Do you think America is stronger than it was four years ago?". Simple, artful and, if you like, unfair appeals. For nobody is better off, and nobody maintains that America has, for the past 20 years let alone the past four, made any show of strength that has impressed the world.

But these two questions turned out to be right on target, for last Tuesday night, NBC undertook a novelty – what it called an exit poll. They set up many thousands of interviews with people across the country, people leaving the polls in election districts statistically chosen as a cross-section of the peoples' mood. Voters were simply asked what issues had forced them to vote the way they did?

Overwhelmingly the answer was two issues – the state of the economy, which means inflation, unemployment, the cost of housing, and the fear that America is not as militarily strong as it ought to be. Now these issues, of course, concern politicians of all stripes, not least Jimmy Carter. And most people I think know in their bones that nobody, except perhaps the West Germans and the Japanese, seem to be able to stop inflation.

Why, then should Jimmy Carter have to take the blame? First, a simple reason but one loftily overlooked by election pundits: Jimmy Carter is in the White House, as Herbert Hoover was when Wall Street crashed. But what emphasised his incumbency was nobody but Jimmy Carter himself. Instead of doing what Franklin Roosevelt did in four elections, never mentioning the name of his opponent, he decided to make Ronald Reagan and his character the issue. The tactic backfired. The actual sight of Reagan in the debate obliterated the nuclear button-pressing Dr Strangelove of Mr Carter's fancy.

This is a well-known and fatal tactic in courtroom trials. When the prosecutor paints too gaudy a picture of the defendant as villain, and the defendant sits there looking inoffensive, the jury starts to grow suspicious of the plaintiff, the man who’s doing all this frantic finger-pointing.

And in the end, all the bewildering complexity of the issues that were no more than touched on, and the great array of issues and solutions that were never mentioned, all of them, in the end, I believe, came to focus on the human image of Jimmy Carter.

He is the curator of the mess we are in – if that is what we are in. And maybe, the country said, we should hand the ball to the conservatives who had been moaning and groaning since 1964 at Goldwater’s defeat about the bankruptcy of liberal Democrats and big government. Over simple again, no doubt, but the answer was shattering in its positiveness.

For the first time in 25 years the Senate will be led by the Republicans and its most powerful committees – judiciary, finance, armed forces, appropriations – will have as their chairman, the strong right-wing of the Republican party. No doubt about it, we are about to live, as the Chinese say, in interesting times.

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