The Democrats are all reading it.” In The Real Majority, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued that the election would come down to which party could win the hypothetical forty-seven-year-old Dayton, Ohio, housewife whose husband was a machinist. She was concerned with “the Social Issue,” wrote the authors, which, roughly speaking, meant fear of crime and declining morality brought on by hippies and black militants. “Permissiveness is the key theme,” said Nixon.*3 The Democratic Party regulars were scurrying to distance themselves from student radicals and angry blacks by becoming
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