THE CAMPAIGN: On to the Showdown in Florida

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New Hampshire was past; Massachusetts and Florida were looming ahead in successive weeks. Even as the victory chants in a Manchester hotel broadened his gleaming grin, the boyish-looking candidate took the lectern to talk of the impending challenge by Alabama Governor George Wallace in Florida. Dropping his genteel accent, former Governor Jimmy Carter spoke jokingly in the redneck slang of his rural South, vowing, "And we gon' take 'im!" His traveling Georgia campaign workers whooped with joy. Then Carter, whose Secret Service code name is Dasher, flew off to Boston while most of his exhausted Democratic opponents slept overnight in New Hampshire.

As Carter was rushing to Boston, an unusually anxious Gerald Ford went to sleep in the White House shortly after midnight, without knowing whether he had become one of the few Presidents ever to lose a primary election. He awoke at 5:30 a.m., eagerly turned on a radio—and discovered he had defeated California's Ronald Reagan. Although the margin was only 1.2% (a switch of fewer than 660 votes, out of 108,331 cast, would have changed the outcome), Ford declared he was "delighted" by his first election victory of any kind outside Grand Rapids. A reporter asked him, "Was it like beating Michigan State?" The old Big Ten center laughed and in football lingo indicated that it was much bigger and better: "Oh no, like beating Ohio State."

For both Carter, who only a few months ago was relatively unknown outside the South, and Ford, an unelected President whose performance in office was approved by only 36% of the population in the Harris survey taken in January, the first primary provided sharp injections of added confidence. Carter's solid if unspectacular 30% of the Democratic vote, in a field of five major candidates, lent new weight to his dogged optimism. After three impressive showings in the first five nonprimary, caucus states (he placed first in Iowa, Maine and Oklahoma), his is the only campaign that holds real possibilities of breaking far ahead of the pack.

However thin, Ford's victory seriously stalled Reagan's strategy of seeking a quick knockout in the early primaries—a gamble that could leave Reagan without the will and resources for the long difficult fight now necessary to eliminate Ford. Reagan contended that he was "happy" to "come out with a virtual tie with the incumbent President." His showing was indeed impressive in a historical context, but in fact his aides expected him to win. Now Reagan badly needs to defeat Ford in Florida to erase the "Reagan can't win" label that Ford's men are pushing.