Election '82: Trimming the Sails

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As the vote was analyzed, it became clearer that the Republicans had suffered a more serious setback than first thought. By Friday, Pollsters Richard Wirthlin and Robert Teeter were telling the White House that on the local level the bottom had dropped out of the party. The pollsters were said to be "shaken" by how badly the G.O.P was routed in the statehouses and among crucial voting blocs. The only electoral group found to have given a majority to the Republicans was the one that earns more than $40,000 a year. One White House aide noted that "the Republican Party in Michigan has been set back 20 years," and that "we lost votes in the South that we've had since Richard Nixon."

Financial investors, meanwhile, were not so downbeat. The New York Stock Exchange tallied a record leap on Wednesday, and a record volume the following day (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS).

The swing of the pendulum back toward the Democrats reverses a trend that began in earnest in 1978, when voters sent a message that they wanted lower taxes and less government. Republicans took over three additional Senate seats and twelve more House seats that year, riding a wave of discontent symbolized by the Proposition 13 tax revolt in California. The G.O.P. hoped that the 1980 Reagan victory, which brought them twelve more Senators and 33 Congressmen, signified a new conservative electoral coalition made up of traditional Republicans, blue-collar workers and those concerned with social issues such as abortion and school prayer.

But the failure of Reagan's program to avoid the shoals of a treacherous recession caused people to vote their pocketbooks and restored, at least temporarily, the traditional Democratic coalition. Blue-collar workers in particular returned to the fold with a vengeance. Says Tony Pinello, a local union president in New Jersey: "A lot of our members, maybe as many as 50%, were swingers in 1980 and voted Reagan. They came back because of unemployment, unemployment and unemployment."

On a few occasions, Reagan resorted to raising the social issues in the campaign. In a final broadside at the Democrats, he spuriously charged that "they even drove prayer out of our nation's classrooms," somehow seeking to saddle his political opponents with responsibility for a 1962 Supreme Court decision.

But Reagan realized early on that he could not avoid the economic issue. As Gloucester noted in Shakespeare's King Lear: "I am tied to the stake, and I must stand the course." Reagan's stay-the-course theme emphasized his philosophy of reducing spending and the role of Government, and attempted to encourage voter patience with his economic prescriptions. Says Pollster Wirthlin: "Of those we surveyed, 58% said they believed the President's program would work eventually. It became a question of playing to the future."

The strategy was also one of playing up the past. Reagan blamed the Democrats for getting the country into its current economic crisis. Said he on his final campaign swing: "We are clearing away the economic wreckage that was dumped in our laps."