Talk:United States presidential election, 1984

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article is within the scope of the United States presidential elections WikiProject. This project provides a central approach to United States presidential elections-related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

Please see Wikipedia:Style for U.S. presidential election, yyyy for standards for all "U.S. presidential election, yyyy" pages.

Contents

[edit] Map Colors

Can someone point me to the discussion where it was resolved to change the map/party colors on all the US election pages away from the traditional Red=Democrat/Blue=Republican? I very much object to this change, and am hoping to discuss the matter with the contributors that decided upon this policy of quasi-revisionist history. It is simply unconscionable to me to see FDR is now represented by Blue, that Lake Reagan has disappeared, or that Lincoln now emblazons the Northern states in Red. Particularly since the official source for these maps - the US Government - continues to use the traditional colors. --patton1138 (talk) 17:27, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Billy Davis

Lyndon LaRouche's running mate is listed as Billy Davis. Billy Davis the producer of "I'd like to teach the world to sing", "Things go better with Coke," etc.? Because that's who it presently links to! Even Google doesn't seem to know anything to speak of about the LaRouche Davis (articles that include them both are Googlebait produced by forks of Wikipedia to get attention, and are based only on the fact that "Billy Davis" in this very article presently links to that Billy Davis. Samaritan 03:48, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

  • Well, that Billy Davis was elected Vice President - er, or promoted to Senior Vice-President and Music Director at the McCann-Erickson advertising agency. But it's obvious from [1] it's not the same one. Off to disambiguate... Samaritan 03:53, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  • Now for anybody who can add something to edit Billy Davis (politician)... Samaritan 04:10, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  • The Larouche-Davis part of the article is gone and I don't know if any of the other third-party or independent vote-getters were included in a past version. Is there any policy on including them or not? Schizombie 18:38, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

  • The rule of thumb for the results table is that one either has to have received any electoral votes or at least 0.1% of the popular vote. LaRouche received 0.09% of the popular vote (although there was a debate about the precise threshold, and it may now be lower). However, there is nothing that says that a candidate can't be listed in the main article, but they do have to be somehow noteworthy. For example, in 1872, Victoria Woodhull and Frederick Douglass certainly didn't get enough votes to be listed in the results table, but they are described in the Wikipedia article on 1872 because Woodhull was the first woman presidential candidate and Douglass was the first (albeit unwilling) black vice presidential candidate.

    As far as LaRouche and Davis go, I doubt that their candidacies were particularly noteworthy. This was just one of many runs for LaRouche, and neither the first nor the last. Davis' Wikipedia article is still a stub, and it doesn't appear that he did anything particularly noteworthy in this election, either.

    — DLJessup (talk) 04:37, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

    • Should there be a (detail) page for all presidential elections to cover third party and independent candidates receiving less than 0.1% of the vote, as there is for at least the 2000 and 2004 elections? That would seem to me to be reasonably encyclopedic. Otherwise, to know what other minor candidates there were and how many votes they received, you'd have to either stumble across the WP pages for those individuals or parties (if they have any), or else go to another site. Schizombie 21:38, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
      • You can certainly try. It may be a little difficult: the 2000 and 2004 elections depended on the FEC website for their information, and, so far as I can tell, the FEC is not maintaining pages for previous elections. You might want to try the Clerk of the House of Representatives, who has official vote counts going back to 1920, which are public domain as a government publication. — DLJessup (talk) 02:14, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is the party’s candidate charismatic or a national hero?

Is the party’s candidate charismatic or a national hero? Ronald Reagan was a highly respected and well liked individual even before he became president. He was an actor, president of the Screen Actors Guild and a former governor of California. After his recent death he was regarded as a national hero and is remembered by many as one of the most popular presidents in United States history.

What was the yearly mean per capita rate of growth in real GNP equal to or greater than 1% and equal to or greater than the previous eight years’ growth rate? Economic growth increased from a 2.8 percent annual rate in the Carter administration, but this is misleading because the growth of the working-age population was much slower in the Reagan years. Reagan’s economic policy, “Reaganomics”, was thought as a positive infulenece in the US economy while he was president, but later on in the decade the effects of his policies were exposed. Reagan left three difficult economic barriers to overcome at the end of his second term. First, the privately held federal debt increased from 22.3 percent of GDP to 38.1 percent and the federal deficit in Reagan's last budget was still 2.9 percent of GDP. Second, the failure to address the savings and loan problem early led to an additional debt of about $125 billion. Third, the administration added more trade barriers than any administration since Hoover. The share of U.S. imports subject to some form of trade restraint increased from 12 percent in 1980 to 23 percent in 1988. Was there a serious contest for the nomination of the incumbent party? No, Reagan was coming off his first term which was considered successful on many levels. There was no interference with his re-election. Was there a major third-party campaign? There was no major third party influence during the 1984 election. Ronald Reagan won every state except for Minnesota (where Democratic candidate Walter Mondale served as a senator) and in the District of Columbia. He won with 538 electoral votes, the most in United States history.

- Reagan won in 1984, when 538 electoral votes were cast. However, Reagan did not receive all 538 electoral votes. The winner of every election from 1964 to 2004 was elected with 538 electoral votes being cast (the most in United States history). Chronicler3 20:33, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
If there were a Wikipedia equivalent of a killfile, the original poster would certainly deserve it. I have no idea of what he was trying to get at, and there certainly doesn't appear to be anything actionable in the post.
One addendum to Chronicler3's response: Reagan did receive the most electoral votes (525) in United States history, but only as an absolute number. This is somewhat less impressive than it might appear at first glance: there weren't 525 electoral votes total until the United States presidential election of 1912. As a percentage of the total electoral vote, Reagan got 97.6% of the electoral vote, amazing, but still only 5th in American history (behind both of Washington's elections, Monroe's second run, and FDR's second run). This isn't to take anything away from one of the towering figures in United States history, but to be accurate, we need to be comparing apples to apples.
— DLJessup (talk) 04:57, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Minor parties

I am not sure of the source of the information on Bergland's vote totals, but I believe they are too low. http://www.ourcampaigns.com/ContainerHistory.html?ContainerID=2382 provides the following votes for third party candidates:

David P. Bergland (Lbt) 228,314 Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (I) 78,807 Sonia Johnson (Cit) 72,200 Bob Richards (Pop) 66,336 Dennis L. Serrette (I All) 46,852 Gus Hall (Cm) 36,386 Melvin T. Mason (SW) 24,706 Larry Holmes (WW) 15,329 Delmar Dennis (Am) 13,161 Edward Winn (WkLg) 10,801 Earl F. Dodge (P) 4,242 and 5 others including scattering Chronicler3 12:47, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

The source of the information is given right below the results table:
Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1984 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (August 7, 2005).
Leip is used as the source for the popular vote for almost all of the United States presidential election articles after 1820.
— DLJessup (talk) 14:43, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] war "instigated" by democratic administrations

I removed this: "Although the charge was indeed historically accurate, some observers found it inappropriate." From the end of the following paragraph:

"At a speech to the Republican National Convention, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona repeated Robert Dole's 1976 charge that every war of the twentieth century that the United States got involved in was instigated by Democratic administrations."

It may be true that every war in which the US was involved militarily between 1976 and 1900 started during a Democratic administration (not sure of this myself), but this is far from saying that the administrations "instigated" the wars. Instigated basically means that they started the wars, which does not seem, to me, to be historically accurate in, for example, the case of World War II. If the US did become involved in each of these wars during a Democratic Administration, perhaps the statement should be, "Although it was, at the time, historically accurate to say that the all wars in the 20th century in which the United States became active militarily were wars entered during Democratic administrations, some observers found the statement inappropriate, perhaps because of the implications of the word "instigate"."

Also, it would be seemingly advantageous to get an exact quote on what Goldwater said. Cesoid 21:00, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Voter turnout

Shouldn't it be said somewhere in this article (as well as quite a few other articles about U.S. presidential elections, a quick lookthru revealed) what the actual voter turnout was in percentage points of the voting age population? This is in my opinion as crucial a statistic as the others already stated. --80.221.36.88 01:20, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] primaries

The discussion of the Democratic primaries is pretty awful - there's no dates, and very little detail of any kind. Surely we can do better. Our coverage of the details of presidential elections before Wikipedia's birth ought to be as detailed as our coverage of more recent elections. john k (talk) 17:05, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Walter Mondale Image

The current image of Mondale is of recent years. We need a image of Mondale during the '84 campaign. GoodDay (talk) 21:42, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rightward-shift myth

I'm alarmed that this article suggests a "conservative shift" in the American public took place in the '80s to help Reagan win. Certainly, I could understand that someone with a poor understanding of politics would come to this conclusion, but I believe most political scientists would argue otherwise. Although there was a lot of "crossover" (ex: "Reagan Democrats"), this was hardly evidence of the American public going more conservative. Instead, a dissatisfaction with the Democratic candidates seems to have driven many Democratic voters to abstain or to temporarily latch on to Reagan's seemingly strong character.

Through examining public opinion data, Navarro (1985) found that although voters re-elected Reagan by huge margins, MOST of them actually DID continue to support liberal social programs that he intended to cut. Instead, as Hibbs (1982) noted about the 1980 election, dissatisfaction with Democrats and Carter was the major driving force to vote for Republicans. Later, Kiewiet and Rivers (1985) also reaffirmed that the 1984 election was won by economic factors, not ideological factors. A strong article on the subject is "The Myth of the Conservative Shift in American Politics: A Research Note" by Larry M. Schwab of John Carroll University. It was in Western Political Quarterly: Vol 41, No 4, p. 822 where he says: "...election data indicate no liberal-to-conservative voting trend developed from the mid-to-late 1970's to the 1980's."

If there was a major rightward ideological shift as this article suggests, that would translate into similar ideological changes for Congress - this was not the case. Therefore, I'm removing the article's hint that a rightward shift propelled Reagan's Presidency. If you all need some sources, check below:

Hibbs, Douglas A., Jr. 1982. "President Reagan's Mandate from the 1980 Elections: A Shift to the Right?" American Politics Quarterly 10 (October): 387-420.

Kiewiet, Roderick D., and Douglas Rivers. 1985. "The Economic Basis of Reagan's Appeal." In John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, eds., The New Direction in American Politics. Washington, D.C: Brookings.

Navarro, Vicente. 1985. "The 1984 Election and the New Deal: An Alternative Interpretation." Social Policy 15 (Spring): 3-10.

Rob Shepard (talk) 20:04, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm OK with your removal of the line in question because it was not sourced, but if there WERE a source, it would be a very different story. Croctotheface (talk) 22:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

no body cares!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.175.51.169 (talk) 13:38, 17 April 2008 (UTC)