Fun pub discussion last night - things your kids will never know or experience

[JHB]

478. No, he would not have won. If you think he would have, show the numbers

If every Anderson vote gone to Carter instead (which is unlikely), it would have flipped a number of states, but Reagan still would have won 331-207:





From there you have to make a reasonable case that not "coming together" cost enough votes in the right places to make a difference. You'd have to shift 62 electoral votes, and don't count on California. Reagan won his home state by a too big a margin for it to shift to Carter under any "come together" scenario.

There's one thing that might have pushed the election in Carter's favor: that would have been bringing the Embassy hostages home, and it didn't happen. But then, that would have had nothing to do with "coming together".

Any time anyone talks about the 1980 election without mentioning the words "hostage crisis" and "Desert One", then they are not talking about the 1980 election.

I'm not exactly in favor of divisiveness, but the "division gave us 8 years of Reagan" has always struck me as finger pointing by the Democratic establishment, some of whom were responsible for that division. (Let's not forget that one of the factors in Kennedy's challenge was the fact that Washington insiders hated Carter.)