The Ideas Came First, How Magazines and Think Tanks Built the 1980 Landslide

Every landslide you have ever watched on television was decided years before the television came on. The anchors will tell you it was the debate, or the ad, or the candidate's last-week surge. I would like to introduce you to the people who actually won the 1980 election, most of whom never appeared on a ballot, and a good many of whom were arguing about tax policy in a magazine before the winner had finished his movie career.

Here is the thesis, and I will defend it for the next few thousand words: votes follow ideas, and ideas follow institutions. A party that wants to win in a given November has to start in some forgotten spring, with a printing press, a research staff and a stubborn belief that an argument made loudly enough and long enough will eventually be heard.

The harvest

First, what was harvested. In November 1980, Ronald Reagan won 44 states and 489 electoral votes against an incumbent president. Republicans gained 12 seats in the Senate and took control of it, the first Republican Senate majority since the early 1950s, after a generation in the minority. Among the Democrats who lost were Frank Church of Idaho, George McGovern of South Dakota and Birch Bayh of Indiana, men who had defined the Senate's liberal wing for years. The House also moved sharply to the right, gaining Republicans by the dozens, though the Democrats kept control of it.

Now ask the obvious question, which is how a movement that the pundits had buried sixteen years earlier managed a result like that. The honest answer is that it did not happen in sixteen months, or even in sixteen years of campaigning. It happened in a quarter-century of laying pipe.

1955: the magazine

In November 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review. At the time, the conventional view among intellectuals was that conservatism was not a serious set of ideas but a collection of irritable impulses. Buckley's opening statement said the magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop," and that it did so when almost no one was inclined to. It is one of the best sentences in the history of American magazines, and it was also a business plan.

The point of the magazine was to be a place where the different kinds of conservatives could argue with one another and with the world: the traditionalists, the free-market economists, the anti-Communists. It brought them into the same room, and in doing so it began to turn a mood into a movement. The conservative coalition that people later called "fusionism" was worked out in its pages, in the argument that free markets and traditional moral order protect each other. Whether you agree with every part of that argument, it gave the coalition a shared vocabulary, and a shared vocabulary is the first piece of political infrastructure.

I will say this for the old-fashioned magazine: it is a cheap way to change a country. A few thousand subscribers, if the right ones, are enough to reach every newsroom, every campaign headquarters and every congressional staff in the capital. The ideas that start in a small-circulation journal tend to arrive in a large-circulation newspaper five years later, and the party platform ten years after that.

1960: the young people

In September 1960, a group of young conservatives met at Buckley's family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and adopted a short statement of principles. The Sharon Statement, drafted largely by M. Stanton Evans, affirmed among other things that the foremost aim of the political order is the preservation of individual liberty, that the market economy is the system most compatible with that liberty, and that the forces of international Communism are the greatest threat to it. From that meeting came Young Americans for Freedom.

Think about what that organization did. It took people who were nineteen and twenty in 1960 and gave them a place to learn the argument, a network of friends who held it, and a reason to show up for the next fight. Those young people ran the 1964 volunteer operation, and some of them, as the story of the Two Years After Goldwater, the 1966 Midterm That Put the Right Back in It shows, were still organizing when the loss was supposed to have ended things. By 1980 they were in their late thirties and forties, which is precisely the age at which a movement's alumni begin running congressional offices, law firms, newspapers and campaigns.

A movement is a pipeline, and the key to a pipeline is that you must start filling it twenty years before you need what comes out the other end.

1973: the think tank

In 1973, Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner, with financial backing from the brewer Joseph Coors, founded the Heritage Foundation. They had noticed something that anyone who has worked in Washington understands: legislators are busy, and the people who give them a one-page argument before a vote tend to influence the vote. Heritage's idea was to produce short, timely, policy-specific papers in the days before decisions were made, rather than weighty studies after.

That was a real innovation, and it shows how institutions change the game. The older research institutions, the American Enterprise Institute among them, had been producing serious scholarship for decades. Heritage packaged its work for the staffer with ten minutes. The Cato Institute followed in the 1970s with a libertarian emphasis, and the Manhattan Institute soon after. The common thread is that each created a place where a thinker could be paid to think, and a pipeline by which the thinking could reach a member of Congress without waiting for a campaign.

I do not want to oversell the think tank. A paper has never passed a bill. But a paper in the right hands, delivered on the right morning, has often changed what the bill looks like, and a movement that has a ready-made answer when a vacancy opens up in the government, whether it is a policy paper or a list of qualified people, wins by the simple expedient of being prepared.

Supply-side economics: the argument that found its candidate

The 1970s economy supplied the problem. It produced inflation and unemployment at the same time, a combination the prevailing economic theories had said could not occur. The word for it was stagflation, and it made the standard assumptions look shaky. When prices rose, wages followed, and inflation pushed families into higher tax brackets without any increase in their real income, a stealth tax increase that Congress never voted on.

The answer a small group of economists and journalists proposed was what came to be called supply-side economics: if you cut marginal tax rates, you improve the incentive to work, save and invest, and the economy grows. Arthur Laffer, the economist, and Jude Wanniski, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, argued the case, and the paper's editorial page carried it to a national audience. A young congressman from Buffalo named Jack Kemp read it, believed it and wrote it into a bill. That bill's story is told in How the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut Went From a Backbench Bill to a Party's Creed, and it is a case of an idea moving from a journal to a legislator to a party's creed.

Notice the order. The economists came first. The editorial page came second. The legislator came third. The candidate who ran on it came fourth. Each step was necessary, and the voters were the last people to hear about it. By the time the voters were asked, the idea had been vetted by every institution that could poke a hole in it.

1978: the voters speak directly

Meanwhile, in California, a pair of tax-limitation activists put Proposition 13 on the ballot in June 1978. The measure capped property taxes at one percent of assessed value and limited annual increases in assessed value to two percent. Rising home values had sent property tax bills soaring, and homeowners, many on fixed incomes, faced the prospect of losing houses they had owned for decades.

Proposition 13 passed with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Here is why that matters for the story. The voters passed it by a wide margin. The message to every politician in the country was that the tax revolt was real, and it was bipartisan: it appealed to renters and homeowners, to Democrats and Republicans. Ballot initiatives are a way for the voters to cut the line, and in 1978 they used it.

The lesson for a strategist is that a movement does not have to wait for a candidate. If the legislature will not act, a voter-initiated measure lets the people vote on the argument directly. A conservative victory on a ballot measure in one state is a proof of concept that a candidate in another can cite.

1979: the churches

The last major institution in the story was the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by the Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, with the encouragement of political organizers such as Paul Weyrich. It registered voters and drew on a large and, until then, politically underorganized body of citizens: churchgoing Americans, many of them in the South and the Midwest, who had often voted Democratic or not at all. The organization turned the moral questions that mattered to those families, among them the family, schools and the direction of the culture, into an argument for political participation.

Whatever one makes of particular positions, the organizational point holds. The people who attended church every week were already networked. They had meeting places, mailing lists, phone trees and a habit of showing up. A movement that can reach them has a ground game before it has a candidate. Tocqueville made the general point about American associations in 1835, and the logic is laid out in Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads: Americans accomplish through voluntary groups what other nations ask of governments.

September 1980: the Capitol steps

By September 1980, the machinery was in place. On September 15, Reagan joined Republican members of Congress and candidates at a joint campaign rally at the Capitol. It was not the 1994 Contract, but the instinct was similar: it said to the voter that the ticket and the congressional candidates stood together.

That moment tied the national ticket to the congressional candidates, which mattered for the Senate result. A presidential campaign that asks for a mandate and brings its candidates along has a better chance of getting both. The class of 1980 arrived in Washington knowing what they had promised, and the promise was one that magazines, think tanks, ballot measures and church networks had been preparing the electorate to hear for twenty-five years.

The best objection, and the answer

Now the point-by-point part, where I state the other side's best case. It goes like this: Reagan won in 1980 because Jimmy Carter was a weak incumbent. Inflation was high, interest rates were high, American hostages were being held in Iran, and almost any credible challenger would have won. The institutions you are praising are a story told after the fact.

That objection has real force, and I will not wave it away. Carter's difficulties were genuine, and they opened the door. Without them, the outcome would likely have been closer. A fair historian gives them heavy weight.

But the objection answers the wrong question. It explains why voters wanted a change in 1980. It does not explain what filled the vacuum. In 1976, with an unpopular political environment after Watergate, Gerald Ford lost narrowly to Carter, and the opposition had no ready program. In 1980 the opposition had one, in a form the voters could understand: cut taxes, restrain spending, rebuild defense, and trust the American people to do the rest. Discontent is a necessary condition for a landslide. It is not sufficient. The ideas determined what the voters did with their discontent.

Put it in the form of an argument.

1. A bad incumbent creates an opening.
2. An opening is only useful to a party with something ready to say.
3. In 1980, the Republicans had a developed argument and a trained corps to say it.
4. Therefore the landslide is explained by both the opening and the preparation, and only the preparation was within the movement's control.

That last point is the one I want you to keep. You cannot control when the other side fails. You can control whether you are ready when it does.

How ideas reach voters before votes reach candidates

Let me lay out the path, because it is a sequence you can use.

1. A magazine or journal states the argument and gives a scattered group a shared vocabulary.
2. A youth organization or campus network trains the next generation to hold it and defend it.
3. A think tank turns the argument into policy and delivers it to staff and legislators on a schedule that matches the legislative calendar.
4. A legislator puts it in a bill, even a bill that loses, so that the argument has a text to be argued over.
5. A ballot measure or a mass-membership group tests it with voters directly, proving that the argument has a public.
6. A candidate adopts it as a platform, and the voters, who have been hearing it in pieces for years, recognize it.

Notice that the candidate is the sixth step in a six-step list, and that this is how the thing works in every successful cycle. If you want to see how the same sequence played out when the Republicans went from minority to majority in the House, read Before the Contract, How Backbench Speeches to an Empty Chamber Built a Majority. For the five-way comparison across the generations, see Five Conservative Comebacks Side by Side, and the Ingredient They All Shared.

What the commentary class still gets wrong

A final word about the commentary, since the people who write about elections have a persistent habit. They cover the horse race, which is to say they cover the last six months, and they come away believing that the election turned on the debate, the ad, or the gaffe. It is a bit like explaining a harvest by describing the weather on the day of the reaping. The seed went in decades earlier.

The same habit leads them to treat institution-building as less newsworthy than a campaign rally, and the result is that when a landslide comes, it appears to have come from nowhere. It came from a 1955 magazine launch, a 1960 gathering in Connecticut, a 1973 foundation, a 1978 ballot measure and a 1979 voter drive. It arrived, in other words, by mail.

I do not say this to minimize the candidate. Reagan's gifts as a communicator were real, and a movement needs someone who can carry its argument to people who have not read the magazines. I say it because the lesson is a hopeful one. You do not have to be a candidate to help win a landslide. You can start a newsletter, run a club, fund a scholarship, join a research group or organize a neighbors' meeting. Every one of those is a plank in the pipeline.

The case in brief

1. The 1980 landslide, with 44 states for Reagan and a Republican Senate majority for the first time since the early 1950s, was the product of about twenty-five years of idea-building.
2. National Review in 1955, the Sharon Statement and Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, and the Heritage Foundation in 1973 created the vocabulary, the cadres and the policy staff.
3. Supply-side economics, Proposition 13 in 1978 and the Moral Majority in 1979 carried the argument to voters through bills, ballots and congregations before any candidate asked for a vote.
4. Carter's weakness opened the door in 1980, but the preparation determined who walked through it.
5. Ideas reach voters before votes reach candidates, and the lesson for the movement is to build the pipeline now, in a quiet year.

What you can do: choose one policy argument you believe in, find the think tank or journal that makes its best case, and send a one-paragraph summary of it to your state legislator's office before the next session starts.