Free Takeover by Richard A. Viguerie

Reagan for being “too extreme” and used the powers of his incumbency to the fullest extent.
    Essentially, Ford ran the old establishment Republican playbook from the 1964 “Stop Goldwater” campaign, and backed by the power of incumbency, and some missteps on Reagan’s part, it worked.
    The battle seesawed back and forth during the primaries, with Ford winning New Hampshire and Florida, Reagan winning North Carolina, Indiana, and Texas, then Ford winning Oregon, Reagan winning California and Ford winning Ohio.
    Reagan’s base was the conservative movement. By this point in the development of the conservative movement, all of the major movement organizations raised money, recruited members and subscribers, and educated voters through the alternative medium of direct mail; these included the
Conservative Digest
, Heritage Foundation,
Human Events
,
National Review
, American Conservative Union, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and Jesse Helms’s Congressional Club, among others.
    Unlike President Ford, whose base was the big donors of the Republican establishment; Reagan remained competitive because he had 250,000 small donors acquired through direct mail.
    The new and alternative medium of direct mail played a key role in keeping the Reagan campaign alive, as Reagan would regularly send out an appeal for money to his small donors, and then use it to go on TV to make a pitch and raise more money.
    Ford won sixteen of twenty-seven primaries and 53 percent of the total primary vote. In the caucus states, there was “hand-to-hand combat” for every delegate. Reagan ultimately won 56 percent of the caucus state delegates. 19
    When the Republican National Convention opened in Kansas City, neither candidate had a majority of delegates. In a bid to attract moderate support, Reagan announced that if nominated, he would ask moderate senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania to serve as his running mate. Reagan’s attempt to unify the party seemed to backfire; liberals and the Republican establishment remained opposed to his candidacy, and many conservatives were irritated.
    Senator Jesse Helms went so far as to encourage a “Draft Buckley” movement, to draft New York’s conservative senator James Buckley for president on the theory that Schweiker was too liberal to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.
    Various conservative leaders were called upon to calm the waters. I got a call from Bill Buckley urging me to stay on the reservation, and others got similar calls from other leading conservatives who were close to Reagan.
    Despite the dissention among conservatives over the Schweiker gambit, the nomination was still within Reagan’s grasp until Clarke Reed, the chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, betrayed him and handed the Republican presidential nomination to Ford. Once again, the nomination slipped away from Reagan, as Ford won on the first ballot by a slim seventy-vote margin. 20
    Reagan’s analysis of the defects and shortcomings of Ford’s policies wasn’t disputed by a majority of Republican voters, and it wasn’t what defeated him—he was once again outmaneuvered by the establishment Republicans who controlled the machinery of the party at the Republican National Convention, and beaten by the power of the incumbency.
    But Ronald Reagan made another error that contributed to his defeat—he thought that establishment Republicans actually wanted a unified party going into an election where the GOP was handicapped by Watergate, and he was prepared to add Schweiker to the ticket if that would unify the party.
    The Republican establishment saw things quite differently.
    Far from unifying the Republican Party, and bringing in new votes from the Right, in 1976 the Republican establishment refused to reach out to conservatives in any meaningful way.
    Their answer to the conservative challenge to Nelson Rockefeller was to put Big Government Republican senator Bob Dole of Kansas on the ballot as the