The close election that ended in a rout: Could 2024 be a replay of 1980?

Polls have consistently indicated that this year’s presidential race is exceedingly close.

At the same time, there have been a few murmurs among analysts that the election endgame could repeat that of 1980, when pollsters erroneously projected a close race between President Jimmy Carter and California's former Republican governor, Ronald Reagan.

That election ended in a near-landslide for Reagan, who won the popular vote by nearly 10 percentage points. The outcome, said the New York Times, left Americans scratching their heads “over how Ronald Reagan won an overwhelming victory in what was supposed to be a close presidential election.”

It was an outcome pollsters had not foreseen, and afterward, they quarreled openly about why their surveys had failed to provide an accurate sense of what the election would bring. “Pollsters spat over why they erred so badly,” read a post-election headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Could this year’s race turn out similarly, in a decisive result unanticipated by the polls? Might the expected tight race morph into a clear popular vote victory, if not a landslide, for former President Trump or Vice President Harris?

As Nate Cohn of the New York Times has pointed out, if polls are even modestly in error this cycle, the result could be “very different” from the tight race they now indicate. Either candidate, he wrote recently, “could win decisively.”

That possibility is far from implausible, as the Reagan-Carter election suggests. Some — but not all — national pollsters concluded after the 1980 election that millions of voters had made up their minds to support Regan in the campaign’s closing days and hours, confounding expectations that polls had set.

Many pollsters ended their fieldwork before the closing weekend of the 1980 campaign — a cost-saving move that has contributed to predictive failure in more than a few elections.

“I could kick myself,” Warren Mitofsky, polling director for CBS News, said afterward. “Clearly our mistake was not to have polled in the last two days” before the election. The final CBS-New York Times poll before the 1980 election estimated Reagan’s lead at 1 percentage point. The final Washington Post poll indicated Carter was ahead by 4 points.

Of course, no two presidential elections are quite the same in their rhythms, personalities or issues. But at least a few leading issues this year — especially the economy and the Middle East — are prominent enough to invite comparisons to 1980, when Carter was seeking reelection.

His term had been battered by high inflation and defined by turmoil in the Middle East — notably, the taking of U.S. diplomatic personnel as hostages in Iran in 1979. On election day 1980, Iran’s theocratic regime still held 52 Americans hostage. Tantalizing suggestions about their imminent release went unfulfilled.

Carter and many Democrats depicted Reagan, a former actor and two-term California governor, as a divisive and reckless politician who as president would be too eager to send the Marines into global hotspots. Carter sought to frame the election starkly, as a choice between peace and war.

Among the commentators to have noted parallels in presidential politics of 1980 and 2024 is Dick Morris, who served as an aide to former President Clinton.

“If, in October of 1980, you had predicted that Ronald Reagan would defeat incumbent president Jimmy Carter in a landslide, you would have been met with the same derision I encounter in saying that Trump will decisively defeat Kamala Harris,” Morris wrote earlier in October.

“Landslides take time to build and they are by no means evident weeks before an election,” he added. “And so it is with Trump v. Harris.”

As in 1980, no poll is hinting at a blowout win for either Trump or Harris. And similarities between the campaigns of 1980 and 2024 are inevitably imprecise. Trump and Harris, for example, face no serious third-party opponent, as Reagan and Carter did in 1980 — independent former Rep. John Anderson (R-Ill.) won 6.6 percent of the popular vote.

Reagan and Carter met in one head-to-head debate, convened in Cleveland a week before the election. Such timing would be unthinkable today; after all, Trump and Harris convened their only face-to-face debate Sept. 10.

During the 1980 debate, Reagan came across as good-natured and cheery — hardly the extremist or fearsome warmonger. His closing remarks incorporated a memorable line, one recalled nowadays as a devastating indictment of Carter’s administration: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

In the final analysis, then, could 2024 become 1980 redux?

The parallels are inviting, but a comparable outcome seems unlikely. Too many voters are just too eager to vote for Trump, or to vote against him. That probably means the election will not be a popular vote rout.

Just as no two presidential elections are quite alike, so it is with polling failures. When they fail, polls fail each in their own way. Should that pattern hold, the unanticipated rout of 1980 won’t be replicated this year.

W. Joseph Campbell is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C., and the author of seven books including, most recently, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.” His handle on X is @wjosephcampbell.