In trying to come to grips with a surprisingly big and wide-ranging electoral victory by Donald Trump and his Republican Party on November 5, the search for precedents is inevitable. And to a lot of shell-shocked Democrats with a grasp of political history, comparisons to the election of 1980 make some sense. Then as now, close polls failed to accurately predict a big late lurch of support toward the GOP candidate. Then as now, an incumbent Democrat with a reputation for economic and foreign-policy fecklessness was a sitting duck for a simple campaign promising change. Then as now, runaway inflation and correspondingly high interest rates ravaged working-class fidelity to the party of FDR. And then as now, that party had developed an unsavory reputation for subservience to interest groups and out-of-the-mainstream elitism.

Ronald Reagan was no Donald Trump; you have to go all the way back to presidents like Andrew Johnson to find anyone whose brand of “populism” was so crude and racially loaded. The Gipper was famously sunny. But it’s difficult to convey to anyone who wasn’t an adult in 1980 how terrifying he seemed to liberals: a “grade-B movie actor” who led and symbolized the takeover of his own party by extremist ideologues, a coalition of unreconstructed southern segregationists, Nixonian cold warriors, laissez-faire anti-government cranks, and newly politicized conservative Evangelicals.

Meanwhile, decades of conservative mockery of Reagan’s victim, Jimmy Carter, have definitely obscured the fact that the 1980 election felt, and according to the polls truly was, competitive until the very end. The average polling error was 6 percent, meaning the polls overestimated Carter’s vote by that significant of an extent. Reagan won by 9.7 percent, carrying 44 states and earning 489 electoral votes, and Republicans flipped control of the Senate for the first time since 1954.

The shock of the 1980 results was actually greater than what........

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