Volume 1, Number 29
It was about 5:30pm on a cool Tuesday evening, Election Night, 1980. I was managing the reelection campaign of a freshman GOP legislator and we were getting the headquarters ready for what we hoped would be a Victory Celebration (it was) later in the evening. The polls had just closed on the east coast, but California voters still had several hours to cast ballots. Many were headed to polling places from work. I had the television tuned to the local NBC news affiliate, when anchorman Tom Brokaw came on screen:
“NBC News has just projected that Ronald Wilson Reagan from the state of California has been elected President of the United States.”
Wow.
Reagan was my hero, a man I admired as much for his conservative stand on issues as for his extraordinary skill as a communicator. I also felt a personal connection to him. I was just 24, but many of my parents’ friends had known Reagan personally from his time as governor. And a woman on our campaign staff, 8 years my senior, had been Reagan’s secretary when he ran for president in 1976.
Soon after Brokaw’s announcement, President Jimmy Carter addressed supporters in Georgia (eastern time zone) and conceded defeat. Soon after that, people out west turned their cars toward home, figuring there was no need to stand in long lines to vote in an election whose outcome was already determined.
Election night 1980 has become famous because of the impact an early call of the presidential race had on turnout in parts of the country that hadn’t yet finished voting. The television networks have responded and now no longer make public predictions or pronouncements while voters are still casting ballots anywhere on the mainland United States.
The presidential election right now is shaping up for an overwhelming win for Barack Obama. The race does seem to be narrowing in some states, but that will just mean that McCain loses states more narrowly then he might have. The Electoral College math doesn’t seem to be in jeopardy. Obama is on track to win over 350 Electoral College votes, the type of landslide victory that Reagan achieved in 1980.
National TV networks will not be making early predictions of Obama’s expected victory next Tuesday, but a lot of others surely will be.
With the proliferation of news sources, especially on the Internet, news of an Obama win will be a hot topic of discussion on Tuesday night. We may very well know the winner of the election as people are leaving their places of work in California shortly after 5pm.
What will that do to turnout? Will all these new and occasional voters who only show up to cast a vote for president still bother to go to the polls if they think Obama has already won?
And if they don’t, what impact will that have on other contests?
This will be something interesting to watch for on Tuesday night, and for young people in political science classes to study years from now.
I only hope I am still around to write about what happened in 2008 as clearly as I can remember that cool fall night in 1980.
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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his stand on all the ballot propositions yesterday. I got a call from someone asking for my reaction. Here it is:
“Who cares?”
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