The road to the presidency was long for Ronald Reagan. His race to the presidency started in 1976; Reagan thought President Ford was too much of a moderate liberal and decided to run against him. The first few months did not go well; by March, he had lost five primaries in a row. The Republican National Committee wanted him out of the race and the campaign was in debt. Reagan and his aides were in a hotel room in Wisconsin and met to debate getting out of the race. The talks went back and forth before Reagan decided to borrow another hundred thousand dollars and declare he was running all the way to Kansas City and he did not care if he lost all the primaries. The day after the decision to continue the race, he won the primary in North Carolina. This illustrates Ronald Reagan's strong will to win the presidency. This paper will show how that strong will helped Reagan win the election of 1980.
Ronald Reagan was mentioned as a presidential candidate in every election since 1968; many republican rivals thought him too old to be a force in 1980. One of the first things Reagan did, when entering the run for the president, was establish a political actions committee. The committee collected and contributed more than six-hundred thousand dollars to Republican candidates. All of the money collected helped Reagan to form a national network of loyal partisans, which he would use as a base for the 1980 election. Reagan's campaign director, John Sears, wanted to move him closer to the center of the ideal spectrum. Due to this, Reagan did not participate in the debates among major Republican candidates right before the Iowa caucuses. Because he did not participate, the press declared him the loser. Reagan went on to lose the Iowa caucus to George Bush. Reagan moved his campaign across the country to the New England states, participated in two debates, and won the New Hampshire primary.
