Reagan Coast-to-Coast

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

And he sweeps a host of new Republican faces into office with him

Landslide. Yes, landslide--stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits and political professionals. After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide. The American voter had struck again. Half the election-watching parties in the nation were over before the guests arrived. The ponderous apparatus of the television networks' Election Night coverage had scarcely got on the air before it was over. NBC called the winner at 8:15 p.m. E.S.T., and the loser conceded while Americans were still standing in line at polling booths in much of the country. In a savage repudiation of a sitting President not seen since F.D.R. swept away Herbert Hoover in the midst of the Great Depression, Americans chose Ronald Wilson Reagan, at 69 the oldest man ever to be elected President, to replace Jimmy Carter in the White House.

It was shortly after midnight when the hamlet of Dixville Notch, N.H., became the first community in the nation to cast its ballots and set a trend that never varied: 17 to 3 for the challenger. Once the big count began, all the shibboleths of the election--that Americans were confused, apathetic and wished a plague on all the candidates and, above all, that they were closely divided--were swept away by a rising tide of votes, some hopeful, many angry, that carried Reagan to victory in one of the most astonishing political and personal triumphs in the nation's history.

Even before the counting began, reporters' interviews with voters leaving the polls made clear that a remarkable Reagan victory was gathering force. That force quickly proved tidal. Some of the first returns came from states that Carter had to win to have any hope at all, and they made it mercilessly clear that the White House would no longer be his. On the tide rolled, through Carter's native South, into the nation's industrial heartland, on to the West, until, reluctantly at the end, even New York fell to the Republicans.

As the tallies piled up, they buried nearly every comfortable assumption that the pundits had made about how Americans would cast their ballots. Among them:

> The growing promise that the American hostages in Iran would be returned--the closest thing to the "October surprise" that the Reagan camp had long dreaded--apparently helped Carter not a bit, and may have cost him dearly.

> Independent Candidate John Anderson did not elect Ronald Reagan by significantly weakening Carter; indeed he had no effect on the election outcome as a whole.

> The huge number of voters who had told pollsters that they were undecided evidently broke decidedly for Reagan, thus confounding the conventional wisdom that disaffected Democrats in the end would "come home" to their party.

> Women, who had been thought particularly susceptible to Carter's charge that Reagan might lead the U.S. into war, did not vote Democratic in anything like the numbers expected.

When it was over, Reagan had won a projected 51% of the popular vote and an overwhelming 44 states, with the staggering total of 489 electoral votes. Carter took 41% of the popular ballot and a mere six states, with 49 electoral votes (Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia).

Moreover, Reagan carried Republicans to victory--or perhaps Carter dragged Democrats to defeat--around the country. The Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time in 26 years and made substantial gains in the House, creating more conservative chambers for the Reagan Administration and knocking out of office some key Democratic stalwarts. The voters who cast their ballots for a President-elect who has pledged to reverse the tone and direction that have prevailed in Washington for almost half a century also retired such noted liberal Democratic Senators as Birch Bayh in Indiana, George McGovern in South Dakota, Frank Church in Idaho and John Culver in Iowa. Even Washington's Warren Magnuson, a fixture in the Senate since 1944 and No. 1 in seniority among all 100 Senators, went down to defeat. In the House, powerful Ways and Means Chairman Al Ullman got the ax, as did Indiana's John Brademas, the majority whip.

Reagan's triumph dismembered the old Democratic coalition. Jews, labor-union members, ethnic whites, big-city voters--all gave Reagan far more votes than they usually cast for a Republican. The disaster left the Democratic Party, which has held the presidency for 32 of the 48 years since 1932, badly in need of a new vision and a new agenda.

Though the dimensions of the landslide were totally unexpected, both camps knew from their polling in the final days that the momentum was swinging to the challenger. The debate completed the process of certifying Reagan in the public mind as an acceptable President, and the hostage news seemed to remind voters of all their frustrations with the state of the country and Carter's performance as President.

On election eve, calling on all his skill in the medium he uses best, Reagan delivered a superbly moving half-hour TV speech. He called a roll of patriotic heroes from John Wayne to the three astronauts killed in a launch-pad accident, asked the voters "Are you happier today than when Mr. Carter became President?" and said, in relation to the U.S. role in the world, "at last the sleeping giant stirs and is filled with resolve--a resolve that we will win together our struggle for world peace." It was the kind of speech hardly another living politician would have been able to bring off, but Reagan did magnificently--and not least because it was evident it is what he profoundly believes about America and its rightful world role.

Trying to recover, Carter put in a brutal final week--26 cities in 15 states and more than 15,000 miles in the air. In the last 24 hours before the election, Carter stepped up his blitz in a desperate cross-country chase that took him 6,645 miles to six key states ("I need you, I need you, help us!" he implored the crowds) before touching down in Georgia's dawn fog on Tuesday morning so that he could vote in Plains. His throat was raspy. His right hand was scratched red from ceaseless, frantic "pressing the flesh" with the throngs that met him. He had put on pancake makeup to cover the red blotches on his face, but the signs of weariness showed through. He had scarcely slept since the latest hostage maneuvering broke early Sunday morning.

After voting with Rosalynn, Carter drove over to the railroad depot, the initial headquarters for his 1976 campaign, to greet an attentive crowd of 100 residents and 200 reporters. Suddenly, for the first time in public, he started to betray what he knew--that he was going to lose. While his aides dug their shoes into the red clay and stared at the ground, Carter gave a rambling talk for ten minutes about the accomplishments of his Administration. "I've tried to honor your commitment," he said at the end. "In the process, I've tried . . . " His voice broke, and tears welled up in his eyes. Rosalynn looked on in agony. Carter recovered his composure and ended quickly, "to honor my commitment to you. Don't forget to vote, everybody."

When the Carter party flew back to the White House, aides began working up the President's concession speech even before the first announcements were made. "I want to go out in style," Carter told his advisers. "I want this country to know it's going to have an orderly transition."

Later, Carter sat with his top aides in the family quarters on the second floor of the White House and watched the news of his defeat. "I lost it myself," he said. "I lost the debate too, and that hurt badly." He was composed, not vindictive, a man trying to analyze why the nation was rejecting him so emphatically. "I'm not bitter," he said. "Rosalynn is, but I'm not." Rosalynn agreed: "I'm bitter enough for all of us."

To make his concession speech, Carter appeared before his dispirited followers at 9:45 p.m., an hour and a quarter before the polls closed on the West Coast. By admitting defeat, Carter may well have discouraged Democrats from going to the polls and supporting other party members on the ticket; the timing of his speech was a small reminder of how little he had cared about party affairs and loyalties.

Reagan was in bounding good humor throughout the final days, buoyed by reports from his pollster, Richard Wirthlin, that he was steadily gaining. On Monday he played Peoria, Ill., and played it well, his voice getting richer and stronger throughout the day. At a campaign-closing rally in a shopping mall near San Diego, a few hecklers kept screaming "ERA!" Reagan stopped in mid-sentence and snapped, "Aw, shut up!" The crowd erupted with cheers of "Reagan!" The candidate cocked his head, grinned and said: "My mother always told me that I should never say that. But this is the last night of a long campaign, and I thought just once I could say it." It was Reagan at his avuncular best.

On Election Day, Reagan voted in the morning and refused to make any predictions. "President Dewey told me to just play it cool," he said. At 12:15 p.m., Wirthlin called with good news about the early returns. Reagan's response was to cross the fingers of one hand above his head and rap on wood with the other hand. At 5:35 p.m., he was stepping out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, when the phone rang; Jimmy Carter was calling to congratulate him.

At the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, Reagan mingled with old California backers and show-biz friends such as Jimmy Stewart and Charlton Heston, and got a surprising phone call from Ted Kennedy, offering his cooperation.

When Reagan finally went downstairs to make his victory speech to wildly cheering supporters, he struck the same mixed tone of humility and boyish glee that so obviously had charmed American voters during the campaign. Said he: "I consider that trust you have placed in me sacred, and I give you my sacred oath that I will do my utmost to justify your faith." That was the sober side; the other showed a few moments later when supporters brought him a cake shaped like the country, lush with flags marking the states he had carried. As the bearers held it up, the cake started to slip. Said Reagan with his widest grin: "When that began to slide, I thought that maybe the world was going out as I was getting in."

Reagan could certainly be pardoned for feeling that life begins at 69. His rise has been one of the most remarkable success stories in American politics, and he has come a long, long way. Entering political life only after his show-business career was washed up, he had his first run for elective office at 55, an age when many successful men are thinking of retirement. Despite eight effective years as Governor of California, he was twice denied his party's nomination for President.

Indeed, to achieve his triumph, Regan had to break most of the unwritten rules about White House eligibility . At the start of the year, he was widely considered too old, and his background as a movie star too frivolous, for the Oval Office. Above all, he was thought too conservative. Even last spring, as Regan was sweeping aside a crowd of rivals in one Republican primary after another. Gerald Ford was grumbling that "a very conservative Republican [he did not have to say whom he meant] cannot be elected."

Regan did moderate is tone and rhetoric as it became clear that he had a serious chance of winning. He spent endless hours countering the main charge of Carter's campaign: he was a warmonger. He constantly reassured voters that he would not dismantle Social Security, end unemployment compensation. Quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt as though he were a kind of patron saint, bizarre as that seemed, Regan adopted the old Democratic pledge to create jobs and "put this country back to work."

Regan never backed away from his basic principles or essential message abroad, the source of most trouble in the world is the Communist drive for global domination; at home, the fount of most American woes is the overblown, endlessly intrusive Federal Government. In foreign affairs, the U.S. must build up its military power and face down the Soviets. At home, Regan watchword will be less: less federal spending, less taxation, less regulation, less federal activism in directing the economy and curing social ills--in fact, less Government period.

But through the conservative trend of the country was obvious from the results. Regan's mandate was a good deal less than indicated by his 489 electoral votes or by Wall Street's thunderous vote of approval the next day (79 million shares traded, the second busiest day in the New York Stock Exchange's history, and a jump of nearly 16 points in the Dow-Jones average). His victory was surely not so much an endorsement of his philosophy as an overwhelming rejection of Jimmy Carter, a President who could not convince the nation that he mastered his job. Overseas, he could never seem to chart a consistent policy to deal with the rise fo Soviet power and hold the allegiance of U.S. allies. But that faliure was far overshadowed in the election by the roaring inflation that Carter's numerous switches in economic policy could never stop or even slow, and the rising unemployment that seemed to accept as the price of an ineffective anti-inflation program.

Regan scored heavily with his repeated question of whether voters felt they were better of than they had been four years earlier. Said Republican Governor James Thompson of Illinois: "A lot of people, the so-called silent majority, went into the voting booths and said. 'To hell with it, I'm not going to reward four years of faliure.'" One telling incident: in the mill town of Homestead, Pa., half a dozen steelworkers cheered Ron Weisen, president of Local 1397, as he told a reporter that he was voting for Regan. Said Weisen: "Carter ignored us for 3 1/2 years, and now he comes around asking for our votes. Well, he's not getting them." Nearby was a carton of Carter posters that the workers had never bothered to unpack. Weisen sneered: "We'll turn them over to use them as place mats at our next beer bash."

Read one way, the election illustrates nothing so vividly as the perils of being President. The voters have just turned an incumbent out of office for the second election in a row for the first time since 1888, and ended one party's control of the Government after only four years for the first time since 1896. In a time of trouble at home and abroad, the President has become the lightening rod for all the discontents of the citizenry.

But for Ronald Regan, that is a problem to face come Jan. 20. After four years of Jimmy Carter, Americans cleary yeared for someone who would do things differently or at the very least would provide them more leadership. Evidently Regan convinced them that he held out that promise.

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and Christopher Ogden with Carter

With reporting by Laurence I. Barret, Christopher Ogden

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.