Some years ago several observers include one or two here at FR said that if President Reagan had made one or two more visits to Minnesota to fire up his voters, he would have carried the state.
True.
The Washington Post ran a fraudulent poll that probably cost Reagan Minnesota:
By 1984, Reagan was an extremely popular incumbent president. He was running well everywhere against Mondale. But suddenly, up popped a curious Washington Post poll that indicated Reagan’s 1980 margin of over 16% in California had dropped precipitously to single digits. Nancy Reagan was alarmed, calling campaign manager Ed Rollins (full disclosure, my former boss) and saying, « You have to do something. »Rollins disagreed, as he later wrote in his memoirs Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics.
A Californian himself Rollins was certain Reagan was just fine in California. The Reagan campaign’s own polls (run by Reagan’s longtime pollster Dick Wirthlin) showed Reagan with a « rock-solid » lead. After all, said Rollins, « Californians knew Ronald Reagan, and either loved him or hated him. He’d been on the ballot there six times and never lost. » The Post poll data made no sense. But Mrs. Reagan was insistent, so Rollins ordered up another (expensive) poll from Dick Wirthlin. Rollins also dispatched longtime Reagan aide and former White House political director Lyn Nofziger, a Californian as well, back to the Reagan home precincts. More phone banks were ordered up. In all, a million dollars of campaign money that could have been spent on Minnesota — Mondale’s home state where the ex-Minnesota Senator was, remarkably, struggling — was spent on California because of the Washington Post poll.
A few weeks later, the Washington Post ran a story that confirmed Rollins’ initial beliefs. The Post confessed that… well… oops… it had made a mistake with those California polling numbers. Shortly afterward came the November election, with California once again giving Reagan a more than 16 point victory. In fact, Reagan carried 49 states, winning the greatest landslide victory in presidential history while losing Minnesota in — yes — a close race. Mondale had 49.72% to Reagan’s 49.54%, a difference of .18% that might have been changed by all that money that went into California. Making Reagan the first president in history to win all fifty states.
After the election, Ed Rollins ran into the Washington Post’s blunt-speaking editor Ben Bradlee and « harassed » Bradlee « about his paper’s lousy polling methodology. »
Bradlee’s « unrepentant » response?
« Tough sh…t, Rollins, I’m glad it cost you plenty. It’s my in-kind contribution to the Mondale campaign. »
The Washington Post has been publishing fake news for decades.
By report (but I can’t say with certainty), the Reagan campaign knew that it was within striking distance of Minnesota, and a 50-state blowout. There was a proposal within the campaign organization to send President Reagan to the state, to try to tip it. The proposal was stopped by the only person who could stop it—President Reagan. He knew that he was going to humiliate Vice President Mondale anyway, so he decided to back off Mondale’s home state. Reagan didn’t throw the state, but he didn’t really contest it, either. His position was roughly “Let him win his own state. I’ll settle for the rest.”