October 3, 1980

Claiming that Republican candidate Ronald Reagan was “lulling people into apathy,” Keke Anderson, speaking at Vassar in support of the independent presidential candidacy of her husband, John Anderson, said, “This country is in trouble!” Telling students that she would be campaigning six days a week in support of her husband, a former ten-term Illinois congressman and political reformer, and his running mate, Patrick Lucey, a former Wisconsin governor and ambassador to Mexico.

Ms. Anderson reported that her husband’s “acceptability rating” stood at 62 percent and—according to Daniel O’Brasky ’83, writing in The Miscellany News—that “Mr. Anderson is drawing equally from both [President Jimmy] Carter and Reagan in response to Carter’s ‘A vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan’…tactics.” The Anderson/Lucey ticket lost in a Reagan landslide, garnering only 7 percent of the popular vote.