Marc C. Johnson - Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party

TUESDAY NIGHT MASSACRE

FOUR SENATE ELECTIONS AND THE RADICALIZATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

MARC C. JOHNSON

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

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For Rob and Nathan

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A NEW KIND OF POLITICS

Were on the cutting edge of politics.

JOHN T. TERRY DOLAN, COFOUNDER OF NCPAC

Just a few minutes past 8:00 P.M. Pacific time on November 4, 1980, president-elect Ronald Wilson Reagan took the stage of the Century Plaza Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles to claim one of the most lopsided presidential wins in American history. Reagan, a former Hollywood actor turned Republican governor of California, had, many thought improbably, won forty-five states and 489 electoral votes and denied Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter a second term, inflicting a drubbing more complete than Herbert Hoover suffered in 1932 during the worst of the Great Depression. Carter, his campaign crippled by an energy crisis, out-of-control inflation, and a months-long hostage standoff with Iran, won only forty-nine electoral votes, taking just five states and the District of Columbia. Carter knew the night before the election that he would lose and lose big, and the television networks projected a Reagan victory early on election night. Ignoring the advice of aides who wanted to delay a concession speech until polls on the West Coast had closed, the president phoned Reagan at 9:01 P.M. eastern time to offer congratulations and formally conceded an hour later during a short, emotional speech delivered in a hotel ballroom in Washington, DC. It was the earliestand perhaps costliestconcession in presidential election history. There were reports of voters on the West Coast waiting in line to cast ballots who, upon hearing of Carters statement, left without voting. Many Democrats, already bearing the burden of an unpopular candidate at the top of the ticket, were livid, and several blamed Carter for ruining the chances of some candidates in the West who had lost close elections.

The 1980 defeat of several Senate Democrats was not a huge surprise. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, one of the last Democrats openly opposing civil rights, was dogged throughout his campaign by news accounts of a messy divorce and allegations of financial improprieties that led to a Senate censure vote. Washington States Warren Magnuson, a power in the Senate who had first been elected when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House, was by 1980 a tottering seventy-five-year-old whose thirty-six years in the Senate became an issue. Maggie lost by seventy thousand votes. Gaylord Nelson, the Father of Earth Day and one of the Senates foremost conservationists, lost narrowly to an outspoken conservative Republican challenger in Wisconsin who was aided by Reagans comfortable win there and by Nelsons lackluster campaign. All told, Democrats lost twelve Senate seats in 1980, going from a fifty-eight-seat majority to a forty-six-seat minority. One Magnuson aide compared the Senate Democratic slaughter in 1980 to a plane crash: Everyone killed regardless of merit. The Senate has not been the same since.

This book deals with four other Senate elections in 1980, elections in which long-established and widely accomplished Democrats lost not because of some personal scandal or failure of campaign strategy. Rather, the four senatorsBirch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho, John Culver of Iowa, and George McGovern of South Dakotaendured months of sustained attacks on their character, their patriotism, and their honesty. The four incumbents began their reelection campaigns with favorable assessments from voters, but the attacks eroded that standing, and by November, each was viewed as unsuitable, indeed even dangerous. To be sure, 1980 was a difficult time to be a Democratic incumbent. Carters popularity was a drag on many down-ballot races. The Iran hostage crisis hovered over the entire campaign. Inflation was high, and memories of an energy crisis were fresh. All these factors contributed to the Democratic rout, but Bayh, Church, Culver, and McGovern were forced to confront another reality as well, one that turned out to be more difficult to counter than any difficult policy issue: the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC).

These liberal lions of the Senate, senators with a combined sixty-six years of service, politicians who had their names on such iconic legislation as the Wilderness Act and the creation of food stamps and who had steered constitutional amendments through the Senate, investigated the abuses of the nations intelligence community, and helped create better opportunities for women in college athletics, were targetedand relentlessly pummeledby NCPAC and a host of related conservative groups. Despite long records of public serviceboth Church and McGovern were also World War II veteransthe Democratic incumbents were repeatedly portrayed as out of touch with their states and with voters. This carefully choreographed national campaign of fear, animosity, half-truth, distortion, anger, and in some instances bald-faced lying was as unprecedented as it was effective.

The attacks were possible thanks to a largely unregulated phenomenon that was new to American politics in 1980 but has since become a widely employed attack vehicle: the independent expenditure campaign. Operating not in Indiana or Idaho but out of an office building in suburban Washington, DC, these lavishly funded efforts enjoyed remarkable success by targeting politically passive voters who could be stimulated with highly negative appeals to emotion. One of the founders of NCPAC, a young conservative Republican operative named John T. Terry Dolan, believed that relatively uninformed voters, even many who did not vote regularly, could be made to respond to highly negative attacks that presented divisive issues in stark, emotional, even fearful terms. Under the guise of correcting the record, the attacks were meant to damageor more correctly, to destroypolitical reputations, erode favorable attitudes long held by voters, and position incumbents for defeat by conservative Republican challengers.

There would be no nuanced positions on an issue like abortion. A senator who opposed a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion would be branded a baby killer. Opposition to an expensive new weapons system, even by senators who had devoted their careers to mastering the details of foreign and defense policy, made a candidate a threat to national security. A principled belief that returning the Panama Canal to Panamanian control would best ensure its long-term operation would be dismissed as giving away the canal, likely to a communist-influenced government. As liberal became a pejorative, positions held by liberals were not, in the view of many in the New Right, worth debating, but were simply radical or dangerous.