4. Offering a poorly received and executed campaign, Walter Mondale’s dire performance in the 1984 presidential election has yet to be replicated by any candidate in the three and a half decades since
Serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Walter Mondale was appointed to fill the vacant seat of Hubert Humphrey as a Senator from Minnesota in 1964 following the latter’s ascendance to the vice presidency. Winning re-election twice, serving from 1964 to 1976, Walter Mondale himself later became the forty-second Vice President of the United States under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. Defeating several candidates, notably Gary Hart, in the Democratic primaries, Mondale emerged as the party’s nominee against Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984. Campaigning on a platform of tax increases, debt reduction, and a nuclear freeze, Mondale made history in his choice of Geraldine Ferraro as the first female to share a major party’s presidential ticket.
However, becoming one of the most controversial aspects of his campaign, his choice of the unpopular Ferraro under pressure from women’s rights groups quickly rendered a public perception of Mondale as weak and pliable. Failing to resonate with voters, in contrast to the highly skilled and effective Reagan campaign, the Democratic Party’s efforts faltered. Losing just a single state and the District of Columbia – Mondale’s home of Minnesota – Reagan won a landslide victory with five-hundred-and-twenty-five electoral votes, with no candidate in the decades since matching the Republican’s vote share or electoral count.