November 4, 1980: Ronald Reagan, former actor and former Governor of California, begins an era of Republican dominance, winning 489 Electoral Votes to be elected President. George H.W. Bush, who had held several political posts, including Congressman from Texas and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was elected as his Vice President.
President Jimmy Carter, the Democratic incumbent, wins only 6 States: His home State of Georgia, his Vice President Walter Mondale's home State of Minnesota, Rhode Island, Maryland, West Virginia and Hawaii; plus the District of Columbia, for 49 Electoral Votes.
The popular vote was considerably closer, but still a very solid Republican win: Reagan won 51 percent, Carter 41 percent, and an independent candidate, Congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois, who had run in that year's Republican Primaries, 6.6 percent, though he didn't take a single County, let alone State, and didn't exceed 16 percent in any State.
Did Anderson throw any States from Carter to Reagan? Did he throw any States from Reagan to Carter? Unlikely. Reagan won Tennessee by 4,710 votes, where Anderson got 36,000. But that's the only State that might have been thrown either way, and it was only 10 Electoral Votes.
Comedian Mort Sahl, who had been at this since the Harry Truman Administration, said, "Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed, he would have lost."
The Republicans also gain control of the Senate, with an unusually large gain of 12 seats; and, with 34 sets, what turns out to be not a numerical majority in the House of Representatives, but frequently a "working majority" of Republicans and conservative Southern and Western Democrats that occasionally outflanks the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts.
Among the Democratic Senators beaten were George McGovern of South Dakota, the Party's 1972 Presidential nominee; Birch Bayh of Indiana, who had run for President in 1976, and was beaten by Representative Dan Quayle of Indiana, later to serve as Vice President; and Frank Church of Idaho, whose Committee investigation into the CIA had angered many conservatives.
In the New York Primary, liberal Republican Jacob Javits was unseated in a very nasty campaign by archconservative Long Islander Al D'Amato, who then ran an even nastier campaign in the general election, to beat Brooklyn Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, famed for her role in the Impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon in 1974. Her seat was won by Chuck Schumer, who would knock D'Amato out of the Senate in 1998.
The Congressmen elected in the Class of 1980 become known as "the Reagan Robots," for so rarely opposing him on any vote. The only ones left, 42 years later, are Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and Congressmen Hal Rogers of Kentucky and Chris Smith of New Jersey's 4th District -- which was my family's District until the 1980 Census led to us being put into the 12th.
NBC News called it at 8:15 PM Eastern Time, 5:15 Pacific -- probably sending a lot of Western Democrats home, and maybe costing the Democrats control of the U.S. Senate and several Congressmen their seats.
At the time, NBC and CBS used blue on their State maps for the Republicans and red for the Democrats. ABC used blue for Democrats and red for Republicans, and that's the way everybody's done it since.
in front of their map, with only Carter's Georgia
in Democratic red at this point, and blocked by Brokaw's head.
New York wouldn't be called until 9:00 Eastern.
It was exactly 1 year since the Iran Hostage Crisis began. Carter would work almost literally to the last minute of his Administration, on January 20, 1981, to end it, before leaving for the Capitol with Reagan for the Inauguration ceremony. The announcement that the hostages were free was made at 12:35 PM Eastern Time, 35 minutes after Reagan took the Oath of Office.
Some conservative voters are so dumb (How dumb are they?), they believe Reagan deserves the credit for getting the hostages home. After all, he was President when they were freed; he hosted the welcome home ceremony at the White House a week later; and, they believe, the reason the Iranians let the hostages go was that they were afraid Reagan would drop an atomic bomb on them if they didn't let them go while Carter was still President.
These people are so dumb, they would probably not believe you if you told them that the U.S. win over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympic hockey tournament happened while Carter, not Reagan, was President. But it did. While Sports Illustrated, owned by Time, Inc., named the U.S. hockey team a collective Sportsman of the Year, which is an award, parent magazine Time named Reagan their Man of the Year, which is a distinction recognizing that the person in question was the one who most affected the news in the calendar year.
There was a movement named the Reagan Legacy Project, which wanted to have the federal government replaced Franklin Roosevelt on the dime and Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill with Reagan. That failed. They also wanted his face added to those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, with the slogan "Put Ron On the Rock!" That also failed.
They managed to get National Airport, across from Washington on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, the closest major airport to the White House, named Reagan National, even though that was the airport from which an Air Florida plane crashed a few months after Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers.
The RLP also had a goal of getting something named after Reagan in every County in the country, all 3,067 of them. They have fallen well short. However, there have been highways named after him: Interstate 65 in Alabama from Birmingham to Decatur, State Route 118 in California, Interstate 25 in El Paso County in Colorado, several in Florida including Florida's Turnpike, the Ronald Reagan Parkway in Gwinnett County in Georgia, Interstate 88 and U.S. Highway 14 in Illinois, Intertstate 469 in Indiana, Interstate 275 in Kentucky, U.S. Route 190 in Louisiana, the Ronald Reagan Parkway in Missouri, Ronald Reagan Boulevard in the New York suburb of Warwick, State Route 126 in Ohio, Ronald Reagan Drives in the suburbs of both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway in Arlington, Texas; State Route 234 in Virginia
There have been schools named for him, including high schools in the Miami suburbs, North Carolina, Milwaukee and San Antonio. UCLA Medical Center, where he died on June 5, 2004, has been named for him. So has the Institute of Emergency Medicine at George Washington, D.C., where he was treated after his 1981 assassination attempt. His Presidential Library is in Simi Valley, California, 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles. It opened on November 4, 1991, the 11th Anniversary of his 1st Presidential election. It was attended by the 5 living people who had been President: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Carter, Reagan, and the incumbent, Bush.
Thus far, New Jersey has mostly resisted the Reagan idolatry. The only memorials my home State has for him thus far, that I know of, are an elementary school in Elizabeth, an inner city, which makes no sense, given his legacy; and a street in Washington Township, Mercer County, which makes a lot more sense, since that was the epicenter of the State's nonsensical tax revolt of the early 1990s.
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 3 blocks from the White House, is named for him. It's fitting: Reagan spoke of cutting government spending, but increased it, and the Reagan Building was the most expensive federal government building ever. The USS Ronald Reagan is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, CVN-76, in service since 2001, and nicknamed the Gipper.
There are statues of him in the Capitol Building in Washington; in Covington, Louisiana; and, with all of the other Presidents in recognition of the city's proximity to Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, South Dakota.
Statue, U.S. Capitol, Washington
Reagan is the most recent President born in Illinois, and the most recent and most successful to represent California.
On a 1982 installment of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson played Reagan, emphasizing how he seemed to begin every sentence with, "Well... " He and an actor playing White House Chief of Staff Jim Baker did a takeoff of the Abbott & Costello "Who's On First?" routine, involving a Chinese Premier named Hu, Secretary of the Interior James Watt, and Palestinian Chairman Yassir Arafat.
Reagan was played on Saturday Night Live by Joe Piscopo from 1980 to 1984, Randy Quaid in 1985-86, and Phil Hartman from 1986 to 1989. Bryan Clark played him in Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North in 1989, Without Warning: The James Brady Story in 1991, and Dark Skies in 1997.
The 2003 film The Reagans enraged conservatives, because James Brolin's Reagan was portrayed as bigoted toward black people and gay people. The 2013 film Lee Daniels' The Butler enraged conservatives. Not because Alan Rickman played Reagan, not even really because it was a pro-civil rights movie, but because the actress they hate the most, Jane Fonda, played Nancy.
Among the other actors who have played him are Rip Torn in Airplane II: The Sequel in 1982, Jay Koch in Hot Shots! Part Deux in 1993, Richard Crenna in The Day Reagan Was Shot in 2001, Bruce Campbell in the TV version of Fargo in 2015, Tim Matheson in Killing Reagan in 2016 (a dramatization of the failed assassination attempt in 1981), Jefferson Black in Timeless in 2018, and Stuart Milligan in Wonder Woman 1984 in 2020. (UPDATE: In 2024, Dennis Quaid, a conservative actor, played him very favorably in Reagan, but the film bombed at the box office.)
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November 4, 1980, as have been all modern U.S. Election Days, was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. There were 6 games played in the NBA that night, with neither the New York Knicks nor the New Jersey Nets playing:
* The Washington Bullets beat the Atlanta Hawks, 122-98 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.
* The Detroit Pistons beat the Milwaukee Bucks, 98-96 at the Milwaukee Exposition, Convention Center and Arena, or "The MECCA." Since 2014, it has been named the UW-Panther Arena. John Long scored 33 points.
* The San Diego Clippers beat the expansion Dallas Mavericks, 116-102 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas. Brian Taylor, of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, scored 31 for the Clippers, who moved to Los Angeles in 1984.
* The Phoenix Suns beat the Indiana Pacers, 109-108 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.
* The Utah Jazz beat the Kansas City Kings, 107-104 at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. Adrian Dantley scored 33 for the Jazz. The Kings moved to Sacramento in 1985.
* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 119-118 at The Forum in Inglewood, California, outside Los Angeles. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar led the game with 28 points.
And there were 2 NHL games played:
* The New York Islanders beat the Detroit Red Wings, 6-4 at the Nassau Coliseum. The Isles got a rarity, 6 different scorers: Clark Gillies, Bobby Nystrom, Butch Goring, Bob Bourne, Mike Bossy and Duane Sutter.
* And in what was becoming a nasty Provincial rivalry, the Montreal Canadiens beat the Quebec Nordiques, 5-4 at the Montreal Forum.
