No modern president has lost re-election without grieving privately. The morning after the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide, Carter’s communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, went to visit the president, who was sitting with bloodshot eyes in the Oval Office. “Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don’t like me,” Carter lamented. That number was actually larger, Reagan won 44 million votes to Carter’s 35.5 million votes.
No modern president has lost re-election without grieving privately. The morning after the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide, Carter’s communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, went to visit the president, who was sitting with bloodshot eyes in the Oval Office. “Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don’t like me,” Carter lamented. That number was actually larger, Reagan won 44 million votes to Carter’s 35.5 million votes.