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The U.S. presidential election of 1984 was a contest between the incumbent President Ronald Reagan and the former Vice President Walter Mondale. Reagan was very popular, as his first term had seen the start of a strong economic boom and a resurgence of American military strength. Mondale was unable to deflect these positives or Reagan's personal charisma, and lost in every state in the union except for his home state, Minnesota, which he won by less than 4,000 votes.

Nominations

Republican Party nomination

Ronald Reagan was unopposed as the nominee for the Republican Party.

Democratic Party nomination

The field was crowded in the race for the Democratic nomination:

In the Iowa caucuses, the results were as follows: Mondale 45%, Hart 15%, McGovern 13%, Cranston 9%, Uncommitted 7%, Glenn 5%, Askew 3%, Jackson 3%, Hollings 0%.

In the New Hampshire primary, the results were as follows: Hart 37.3%, Mondale 27.9%, Glenn 12.0%, Jackson 5.3%, McGovern 5.2%, Reagan 5.0% (write-in votes), Hollings 3.5%, Cranston 2.1%, Askew 1.0%.

The field of candidates then shrank tremendously. Ultimately, only three candidates survived long enough to win states: Mondale, Hart, and Jackson.

Jackson was the second African-American (after Shirley Chisholm) to mount a nationwide campaign for the Presidency. He garnered 3.5 million votes during the primaries, third behind Hart and Mondale. He managed to win Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, and split Mississippi, where there were two separate contests for Democratic delegates. Through the process, Jackson helped confirm the black electorate's importance to the Democratic Party in the South at the time. During the campaign, however, Jackson made an off-the-record reference to Jews as "Hymies" and New York City as "Hymietown", for which he later apologized. Nonetheless, the remark was widely publicized, and derailed his campaign for the nomination.

Hart managed to mount a very successful campaign, winning the New Hampshire, Ohio, and California primaries as well as many others, especially in the west, but he couldn't overcome Mondale, who received the majority of the delegates. Mondale used the Wendy's slogan "Where's the beef?" to describe Hart's policies during the primaries.

Mondale won the nomination and chose U.S. Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York as his running mate, making her the first woman nominated for that position by a major party. Mondale ran a liberal campaign, supporting a nuclear freeze and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). He spoke against what he considered to be unfairness in Reagan's economic policies and the need to reduce federal budget deficits.

When he made his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Mondale said: "Let's tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." Although Mondale intended this to demonstrate that he was honest while Reagan was hypocritical, it was widely remembered as simply a campaign pledge to raise taxes, and it likely damaged his electoral chances. (Two years later, Reagan did sign into law a bill that raised taxes for corporations, but at the same time cut taxes further for individual taxpayers.)

General election

Campaign

At a campaign stop in Hammonton, New Jersey, Reagan said, "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey's Bruce Springsteen." Contrary to folkore, however, Reagan did not use "Born in the U.S.A." as a campaign song.

The Reagan campaign was very skilled at producing effective television advertising. Two of the more memorable ads it produced were commonly known as "Bear in the woods" and "Morning in America".

By 1984, Reagan was the oldest president to have ever served, and there were many questions about his capacity to endure the grueling demands of the presidency, particularly after Reagan had an unexpectedly poor showing in his first debate with Mondale. However, in the next debate on October 21, 1984, Reagan effectively neutralized the issue with the following quip: "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Results

Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, winning every state except Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia, creating a record 525 electoral vote total (of 538 possible), and received nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. Even in Minnesota, Mondale won by a mere 3,761 votes *, meaning Reagan came within less than 4,000 votes of winning in all fifty states. Mondale's 13 electoral college votes marked the lowest total of any major Presidential candidate since Alf Landon's 1936 loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the lowest electoral vote for a Democratic candidate since 1872, when Horace Greeley died between Election Day and the vote in the electoral college.

Political commentators, trying to explain how Reagan had won by such a large margin, used the term "Reagan Democrat" to describe a Democratic voter who had defected to vote for Reagan. They characterized such Reagan Democrats as southern whites and northern blue collar workers who voted for Reagan because they credited him with the economic boom, saw Reagan as strong on national security issues, and perceived the Democrats as supporting the poor at the expense of the middle class.

Source (Popular Vote):

Source (Electoral Vote):

Faithless elector

In Illinois, the electors, pledged to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, conducted their vote in a secret ballot. When the electors voted for Vice President, one of the votes was for Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic nominee. After several minutes of confusion, a second ballot was taken. Bush won unanimously in this ballot, and it was this ballot that was reported to Congress.

See also

Further reading

External links

Navigation

United States presidential elections | 1984 elections

Präsidentschaftswahl 1984 (Vereinigte Staaten) | Elezioni Presidenziali degli Stati Uniti del 1984 | 1984年アメリカ合衆国大統領選挙 | 1984年美国总统选举

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "United States presidential election, 1984".

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