John Anderson ran against Reagan and Carter in 1980
John Anderson, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who bolted his party to run as a plain-spoken independent candidate for president in 1980, drawing an enthusiastic if transient following among liberals and college students, died on Sunday night in Washington. He was 95.
His family announced his death in a statement, the Associated Press reported.
The United States was struggling with a recession, a severe energy crisis and the protracted Iranian hostage crisis when Anderson gave up a safe seat in the House of Representatives to seek the Republican presidential nomination. When that try fizzled, he reintroduced himself as an independent, honestdealing alternative to the rancorous business-asusual politics of the major parties.
For a while he had the national spotlight, a 58-year-old maverick whose prematurely white hair, horn-rimmed glasses and clearheaded presentation gave him the air of a genial professor who was not so much above the fray as he was unwilling to play by its rules.
Anderson refused to pander, telling voters in Iowa that he favored President Jimmy Carter’s embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union after it had invaded Afghanistan. He called for a gasoline tax of 50 cents per gallon — when a gallon cost $1.15 — to save energy.
Early on, when all six of his rivals for the Republican nomination assured the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that they firmly opposed gun control legislation, Anderson said, “I don’t understand why.”
“When in this country we license people to drive automobiles,” he added, “what is so wrong about proposing that we license guns to make sure that felons and mental incompetents don’t get ahold of them?”
He was roundly booed.
His backers promoted his campaign style as “the Anderson difference,” but despite it — or perhaps because of it — he never finished better than second in a Republican primary. That came in Illinois, his home state, which he had expected to win. When he did not, losing to Ronald Reagan by fewer than 12 points (Reagan was born in Illinois), he decided to run as an independent.
Drawing support from moderate to liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats and finding a receptive audience on college campuses, Anderson did well in the polls at the start. At one point, upward of onefifth of voters said they preferred him to the major party nominees, Reagan and Carter, the Democrat, who was seeking re-election. Anderson peaked in June, when he was the choice of 24 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll, 25 percent in a Harris/ABC poll and 18 percent in a New York Times/CBS News poll.
His hopes were sustained by the volatility of the 1980 campaign, with its sudden swings of popularity. Carter’s Democratic challenger, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, led by large margins in early polls, only to see the president recover and defeat him soundly in the primaries.
Reagan, the early Republican favorite, spent money lavishly, but lost to George Bush in the Iowa caucuses and trailed in national polls before a solid win in New Hampshire put him back on the road to the nomination. Anderson said he believed that the tide might turn in his favor in “the climactic phase of the campaign.”
So he pushed on, calling Carter a “mean and evasive” campaigner who used a recession and high unemployment to fight inflation, and criticizing Reagan’s campaign “one-liners,” calling them “slick and simplistic.”
But in a pattern familiar to independent candidates, Anderson’s support drifted as voters turned to candidates who they believed could actually win the White House. On Election Day, when Reagan won in a landslide, Anderson ended up with 6.6 percent of the popular vote.
Anderson was perceived as the most liberal of the three contenders. That label probably fit on social issues like abortion, but his economic views were traditionally conservative. He preferred to think of himself as the moderate in the race — a self-description that reflected a marked political evolution.
John Bayard Anderson was born on Feb. 15, 1922, in Rockford, Ill., a son of Swedish immigrants, E. Albin Anderson and the former Mabel Edna Ring. As a boy he worked in the family’s grocery store and was the valedictorian of his class at Rockford Central High School.
He earned bachelor’s and law degrees at the University of Illinois and a master of laws at Harvard. In World War II he earned four battle stars as a staff sergeant in the field artillery in Europe and later worked in the Foreign Service in Berlin and Washington, where he met Keke Machakos, a passport photographer. They married in 1953. Returning to Illinois, he was elected state’s attorney for Winnebago County in 1956.
Survivors include his wife; a son, John Jr.; four daughters, Eleanora Van der Wahl, Diane Anderson, Karen Moree and Susan Friebert; and 11 grandchildren.
He left Congress so he could seek the presidency in 1980, then considered another presidential run in 1984 but ended up supporting Reagan’s Democratic challenger, Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president. He backed Ralph Nader’s third-party run in 2000 and disapproved of the Tea Party movement, telling The New Yorker in 2010, “I break out in a cold sweat at the thought that any of those people might prevail.”
Adam Clymer is a New York Times writer.