https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...polls.html
Could we have another 1980?
"In the final week of this 'dead heat' presidential election, I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's landslide 1980 victory.
Then as now, President Jimmy Carter was polling neck-and-neck with his Republican challenger.
A Gallup poll showed Carter up one percentage point nationally in late October. Only four days before the vote, a CBS News/New York Times survey showed the race to be just as close.
Then the bottom dropped out of Carter's campaign - and Reagan won by nearly 10 points in the popular vote, and a staggering 489 to 49 in the Electoral College.
I was a young campaign analyst at the time, but I'd later join Reagan's vaunted White House political strategy team and we analyzed what drove the landslide.
We discovered thousands of previously overlooked Americans, living in rural and suburban communities — folks who worked 40-hour weeks, lifted the freight, paid the bills and ran the small businesses.
Their voices weren't regularly heard in the halls of power and didn't necessarily vote in every election.
They came to be known as 'The Silent Majority'.
These men and women were not 'country club' Republicans. Many were culturally conservative Democrats or independents who were fed up with rampant inflation, shuttered factories, failed foreign policy and surging crime...."
