Charting the Big Shift

With his wins in New England, Hart becomes the man to beat

New Hampshire? Sure, Hart may have won, but only thanks to a bunch of idiosyncratic Yankees, Volvo-driving Boston commuters and anti-union farmers, all of them living in an antique backwater. Mondale still has the money, the fully packed delegate slates.

Maine? Granted, another Hart upset. Granted, the union muscle did not amount to much. But Mondale's aides say he was catching up at the last minute.

Vermont? A landslide for Hart, admittedly, but with thousands of Republican cross-over votes. Again, New England: some kind of regional quirk...

It had become practically impossible by week's end to explain away the swift, spectacular surge of popularity for Gary Hart. It was also practically impossible to explain. All sorts of Americans, Western conservatives and Eastern liberals, clean-cut Jaycees and long-haired factory workers, seemed to fall head over heels for the concept of Gary Hart. For a year he had been one more dark horse in a forgettable pack of dark horses, a sleek but uninspiring Senator from Colorado. His campaign of "new ideas" went nowhere. Walter Mondale, the shoo-in, treated him like an earnest graduate assistant.

The cathartic upset in New Hampshire seemed to liberate voters last week in nearby Maine (Hart over Mondale, 50% to 44%) and neighboring Vermont (Hart, 70% to 20%). That infectious sense of political possibility caught on and spread west and to the Deep South, where the contenders, variously giddy and panicked, prepared for this week's contests.* "The situation has changed totally," said Joan Bowen, Hart's coordinator in Alabama, where virtually no organization existed last month. "With a victory under his belt, people say, 'Hey, I like him!' They're coming out of the woodwork now."

Last Saturday afternoon Hart won 61% of the Wyoming caucus vote to Mondale's 36%, adding to his political velocity. By then Hart had achieved a kind of effervescent mass appeal, his popularity fueling itself. His surge was not altogether political: a CBS News exit poll in Vermont found his greatest strength among self-described conservatives, while a poll in Massachusetts found that he is preferred most by liberals. Quickest to embrace him were upscale members of the baby-boom generation, known as "initial tryers" to professional marketers. "If you've got a new concept or a new product," said Atlanta Pollster Claibourne Darden, "those are the first people who are going to examine it and evaluate it."

In a matter of days, even hours, after the New Hampshire primary, polltakers from Boston to Birmingham detected shifts in voter sentiment so rapid and large that at first they seemed a matter of sampling error, a computer blip. Vast numbers of citizens who had barely heard of Hart in mid-February had decided, literally overnight, that they would like to see him become the Democratic nominee. Three weeks ago Mondale thought he had Massachusetts locked up. Only ten days later, Mondale had written off the state. "It's the most incredible shift in public opinion I've ever seen," said Chester Atkins, Massachusetts party chairman. "Nothing else even comes close."