“It’s 1980 all over again,” said Rutgers University professor and Senate scholar Ross Baker. “Paula Hawkins, Jeremiah Denton, John East, Steve Symms—the Four Horsemen of the Reagan Apocalypse ride again. A rebellious electorate embraces crackpots and crackpots with certificates of election make public policy.”
As voters directed their anger toward President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by electing Ronald Reagan, they also ushered in a class of senators mostly remembered for, well, being swept in by Carter and Reagan. Among the list that helped the GOP capture the Senate majority that year: Hawkins of Florida, Denton of Alabama, East of North Carolina and Symms of Idaho…
Six years later, Democrats re-claimed control of the Senate.
“The best insight came from [former Kansas Sen.] Bob Dole, who said after the 1980 election something like, ‘If we had known we would have a majority, we’d have run better candidates,’” quipped Adam Clymer, a former Senate chronicler for the New York Times…
“The ones that came in with chips on their shoulder saying, ‘I’m going to tell you guys how to make this place better didn’t do much to affect the process,’” recalled former Sen. William Brock, the Tennessee Republican who served both in the Senate and as Republican National Committee chair in 1980. “But some of them found out that there is a system – and that you can be different and still work within the system.”
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