All of us can take the heat from the special interest groups if we’ve got the support of the middle-class guy.

 — Joe Biden, 1977.

It was November 1980, and one of Joe Biden’s staffers was poring over a list of congressional ratings. The liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action regularly scored every member of Congress on how progressive they were based on select votes. Biden wanted to find out where he ranked.

Biden’s search had been prompted by Ronald Reagan and the Republicans’ staggering landslide victory earlier that month. Reagan, the first challenger to lop off an elected incumbent president since Franklin Roosevelt’s victory over Herbert Hoover forty-eight years earlier, had won by ten percentage points and carried forty-four states, earning 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s forty-nine. He had done so expressly by shattering Carter’s winning 1976 coalition and poaching parts of it for himself: union members, Jews, Catholics, even self-described liberals all defected to Reagan in large numbers. He won the South and the Midwest. The fact that voter turnout had dropped once more to about half the adult population had helped, too.