Victor Davis Hanson devotes his latest National Review Online column to a comparison of the closing weeks of the 2012 presidential election campaign and the 1980 campaign that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House.
[U]ntil the very last week of the campaign, Reagan had an uphill fight. True, he eventually won a landslide victory in the Electoral College (489 to 49) and beat Carter handily in the popular vote. Yet Reagan only received a 51-percent majority.
What had saved Reagan from a perfect storm of negative factors — gaffes, additional conservative candidates on the ballot, a single debate, and a biased media — was not just the debate. Voter turnout was relatively low at only 53 percent. If Reagan’s conservative base was united and energized, Carter’s proved divided and indifferent.
Reagan also won about a dozen (mostly Southern) states by less than 4 percent. Had just a few hundred thousand votes gone the other way in those states, the race might have been far closer than the eventual electoral and popular tallies indicated.
What does 1980 tell us about 2012? Barack Obama, like Carter, can run neither on his dismal four-year stewardship of the economy nor on his collapsing Middle East policy.
Instead, Obama, as Carter did, must stamp his opponent as too inexperienced, too out of touch, and too uncaring to be president. While Carter was a dull speaker and Obama, in contrast, possesses teleprompter eloquence, there is no evidence that Obama is any better a debater than was Carter.
Turnout will matter. Challenger Mitt Romney, like Reagan, is said to have the more fired-up base, but the demography of the electorate is far different than it was 30 years ago and now may favor Obama. There are no third-party candidates to skew the result, but the polls seem just as volatile, as Obama, like Carter, usually surges ahead for a while, only to fall back to even in tortoise-and-hare style.
Unless there is a war abroad or a financial crisis at home — such as the financial trauma that helped the struggling Obama surge past John McCain in mid-September, 2008 — the race between an unapologetic liberal and a confessed conservative will go down to the last week.
The winner probably won’t be decided by old video clips, gaffes, or even campaign money, but by turnout and the October debates — depending on whether incumbent Obama comes across as a petulant Carter and challenger Romney appears an upbeat Reagan. As in 1980, voters want a better president — but they first have to be assured he’s on the ballot.
