coupled with Minnesota’s ten, gave Mondale a bare
13 votes in the electoral college. Reagan had 525.
The popular vote was 54,455,472 to 37,577,352 in
Reagan’s favor; Libertarian Party standard-bearer
David Bergland captured 228,111. The Mondale
ticket lost among nearly every voting bloc, with the
exception of African Americans, who held more
tenaciously to Democratic candidates than ever be-
fore.
Congressional Elections The congressional elec-
tions were significantly less disastrous for the Demo-
crats. They did lose a net sixteen House seats to the
Republicans, but the Republicans had hoped that
the landslide of support for the president would
translate into a revolution in Congress as well, and
that revolution failed to occur. The Democrats, de-
spite their losses, maintained a 253-182 majority and
continued to dominate all important committees
and key chairs in the institution. They also managed
to gain two seats in the Senate, narrowing the Re-
publican majority in that house. Veteran Republican
Charles Percy of Illinois, once considered a serious
contender for the presidency, suffered a narrow, 2-
point defeat at the hands of Paul Simon. Another
former presidential aspirant, Howard Baker of Ten-
nessee, retired. In the contest to fill his empty seat,
Democrat Al Gore, Jr., outpolled Republican Victor
Ashe and independent Ed McAteer by 16 percent-
age points. Otherwise, the Senate’s incumbents were
nearly all reelected.
Impact Reagan’s campaign slogan, “Stay the
Course,” turned the election into a referendum on
the current state of the nation, and his landslide vic-
tory was represented as proof that Americans were
happy with their leadership and the direction in
which the country was headed. Mondale’s defeat,
meanwhile, represented the defeat of New Deal poli-
tics and of the coalition built by Franklin D. Roose-
velt in the 1930’s, which made the Democrats the
dominant party for much of the period between
1932 and 1968. However, the New Deal was defeated
as much by its acceptance as by its resistance. Cer-
tainly, Reagan never attempted to do away with So-
cial Security, and in his speeches referencing Roose-
velt, he claimed not to be the latter’s opponent but
rather the authentic heir to his legacy.
From another perspective, the 1984 election
seems to have represented the high-water mark of
the Reagan Revolution, when the message of na-
tional optimism and prosperity, articulated by a par-
ticularly effective spokesman, received an emphatic
mandate from an unprecedented proportion of the
electorate. It was also the year of greatest strength of
the so-called Reagan Democrats, traditionally Dem-
ocratic blue-collar and lower-middle-class voters who
defected in large numbers from their traditional al-
legiance in order to support Republican candidates.
Reagan’s second term would be marked by a decline
in popularity and power in the wake of the adminis-
tration’s embroilment in the Iran-Contra affair, and
although Reagan’s ideological investments would
continue to define his party and the nation for years
to come, they would not in subsequent years be em-
braced by so sizable a majority of the electorate.Further Reading
Cannon, Lou.President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Places the
1984 landslide in the context of the events sur-
rounding it and—taking a generally critical view
of the Reagan administration—sees the election
(especially the Louisville and Kansas City de-
bates) as the zenith of Reaganism, before a de-
cline set in.
Ferraro, Geraldine, with Linda Bird Francke.Fer-
raro: My Stor y. New York: Bantam Books, 1985.
Unique political testament, written shortly after
the events and offering invaluable personal in-
sight into the trials of campaigning and the trau-
matic impact that candidates’ families often en-
dure.
Goldman, Peter, et al.The Quest for the Presidency,
1984. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Written by
Newsweekjournalists in a journalistic vein, this ac-
count attempts to ferret out some of the behind-
the-scenes maneuvering and personalities that af-
fected the election in 1983 and 1984.
Pemberton, William E.Exit with Honor: The Life and
Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.
Sharpe, 1997. Stresses the overcoming of Rea-
gan’s disastrous performance in the first debate
as being the key event of the 1984 presidential
campaign.
Raymond Pierre HyltonSee also Atwater, Lee; Bush, George H. W.; Con-
gress, U.S.; Conservatism in U.S. politics; Dukakis,
Michael; Elections in the United States, midterm;
Elections in the United States, 1980; Elections in theThe Eighties in America Elections in the United States, 1984 329