1981 United States elections
One can debate to what extent elections for Governor in places like New Jersey and Virginia are bellwethers for the state of politics in the United States, and it is especially questionable how much mayoral elections in New York are representative of the whole of the republic considering New York's uniqueness both demographically but also culturally compared to other major American cities. Nonetheless, the polls of autumn 1981, coming near the end of Hugh Carey's first full year in office as President, were telling of a few different things, and New York came to be seen as an important litmus test for what people thought of the brash Brooklynite, especially in his hometown.
In New York at least, the Carey administration - having passed substantial reform legislation to jumpstart a tepid economy, stared down a potential debilitating strike by the air traffic controllers' union, captured Omar Torrijos and in the week before voters went to the polls supported Sweden in its David vs. Goliath shootout with the Soviets over the course of three days - was redeemed, avoiding what would have been humiliating headlines of Carey's close friend and ally Mayor Mario Cuomo losing to former Rite-Aid CEO and investment banker Lewis Lehrman, who ran a fiery, populist campaign that married the unapologetic conservative persona of Ronald Reagan to the law-and-order rhetoric of Nixonian Republicanism. Cuomo, who despite a great deal of oratorical talent in prepared situations was never known as a particularly dogged campaigner and who had had the misfortune of governing New York City during the nadir of its post-Beame recovery in the midst of the worst recession in forty years, was not quite the underdog but nonetheless faced a remarkably stiff test, especially as Lehrman focused on the high taxes imposed by Cuomo's City Hall to continue making up the city's deficit, the historically high crime rates, and making a fierce attempt to associate the general feeling of decline in the City with Democratic control over its institutions, promising that he would run the city the way he had run Rite-Aid.
This was not as easily said as done, of course. Cuomo frequently reminded voters of how much they had disliked John Lindsay and, for that matter, Abe Beame, unflinchingly hurling his unpopular once-ally and predecessor under the bus. His ads blasted Lehrman as a ruthless businessman and tried to highlight layoffs from Rite-Aid and especially targeted working class white voters in Staten Island and Queens with material that emphasized Lehrman's high-flying lifestyle. Whether this worked is debatable - Lehrman won Staten Island easily and nearly carried Queens, but Cuomo's advantage in his home neighborhood in Jamaica as well as carrying the other three boroughs, especially huge margins in Manhattan, earned him a surprisingly healthy 54-45 win and a second (and, he promised, final) term at Gracie Manor. Nonetheless, Lehrman's blueprint in the outerboroughs - touting one's wealth as experience, aggressively law-and-order, painting liberals as bleeding-heart wimps, appealing to culturally conservative white voters put off by the post-1964 evolution of the Democratic Party - did not go unnoticed by either Democrats or Republicans, and a number of strategists began to ponder how they could use this to their own advantage. In that sense, the lessons learned from the 1981 New York City mayoral election would set up a series of events that would come to define, and indeed haunt, the Carey White House.
Glad as he was that the populist braggadocio of the Lehrman campaign was beaten more soundly than the media perhaps made it seem was likely to be the case, there were little other good signs for Carey in the results from Virginia and New Jersey. The former had largely been expected to go against the administration, despite its history as a Solid South state; thanks to the rapid growth of suburban DC and Richmond, and the slow transition of rural whites from the Democrats to the Republicans, Virginia had seen two Republican governors in the 1970s and only the conservative (by national standards) Andrew Miller had been able to narrowly win in 1977, at a time before the Ford administration's popularity had tanked. Miller's Lieutenant Governor, Chuck Robb, was thus the leading candidate for the 1981 election, facing off against the Republican Attorney General Marshall Coleman. It was not a particularly exciting affair, with Coleman running a bog-standard Nixonian law-and-order campaign but otherwise a moderate profile proposing more investments in education and roads, while Robb promised to continue Miller's slow-and-steady style in managing the Virginia economy. Coleman won decisively, 54-44, to return Republicans to the Governor's mansion for the third time since 1969, bringing 38-year old state senator Nathan Miller (no relation to the outgoing Governor) over the line as Lieutenant Governor while Democrat Gerry Baliles narrowly won the AG's office to prevent the GOP from taking all three.
This had largely been expected by national Democrats, however - it was instead New Jersey that proved the frustrating race, especially, as Carey put it to Paterson in its aftermath, "it's my backyard." A number of reasons were presented for why Democrats failed to win a third straight term in New Jersey in 1981 despite the relative popularity of regionally-associated Hugh Carey. The national environment, despite Carey's positive but gradually declining approval ratings in November 1981, was perhaps not as solid for Democrats as the party had assumed during its "Autumn of Action" and summer unveiling of the boldest legislative agenda since the Great Society. Unemployment and inflation were creeping down but still high; the very strong economy of late 1982 to mid-1985 had yet to reveal itself, and voters were not yet feeling the effects of the Economic Stabilization Act even as the data showed things were turning around.
More crucially, however, was perhaps issues in New Jersey itself. Brandon Byrne's two terms had been boldly progressive but polarizing, and Byrne was seen as having made a mistake in not choosing a successor, which allowed the liberal lane of the party to splinter across multiple candidates. Two Congressmen, James Florio and Robert Roe, jumped into the Democratic primary as outsiders to Trenton, casting themselves as allies of Carey who were nonetheless a change from Byrne and his inner circle. The race turned extremely ugly, and Florio - who was easily the most conservative candidate in the race, even sporting an endorsement of the increasingly right-wing National Rifle Association - eventually won in a small plurality over Roe. On the Republican side, meanwhile, the establishment favorite Pat Kramer, the Mayor of Paterson, faced off in what eventually became an effective two-man race with Thomas Kean, the former Assembly Speaker who had come second in 1977's primary. Both men were regarded as moderates - Kean had been Ford's 1976 state chairman and Kramer ran a city for four terms that leaned Democratic - but ran to the right, endorsing capital punishment, casting themselves as business-friendly and Kramer even cut an ad quoting Ronald Reagan, suggesting just how much the political landscape had potentially changed in the Garden State in the past year. Kean eventually triumphed, in part thanks to hiring Reagan's political director Roger Stone to run his campaign, and for the general election ran on a more Nixonian line - zero tolerance for crime, new spending on transportation infrastructure, and corralling corrupt urban machines. With liberal turnout depressed (it did not help that Florio was based out of Camden and thus had little connection to the Jersey City and Newark-based Democratic party leadership) and Kean running a disciplined campaign, the Republican challenger triumphed by a considerably larger margin than expected, winning 52-47 amidst charges of voter intimidation by the GOP in Democratic-heavy precincts and illegal campaign spending of the type that had eventually brought down Nixon.
[1]
The Lehrman and Kean campaigns thus suggested to Republicans licking their wounds ahead of 1982 and 1984 that there was a roadmap to winning in "Careyland," and that perhaps the issue with Reagan had been his hardened Western individualism and uncomfortably overt footsie with Southern Baptists, instead of speaking straight to the "hard hats," as Nixon called them in a late 1981 interview that seemed to call back to the Hard Hat Riot of 1971. New Jersey was thus the result that Carey took the hardest; it was a win on his turf, suggesting a pathway for the GOP to compete with "his" kind of voter. Kean was immediately a national star for a party that desperately needed fresh faces, and the urgency for Democrats to continue to strike while the iron was hot ahead of 1982 was apparent.
[1] All this is as OTL, except for Kean's margin, which in the actual 1981 was by like 3k votes.
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