The 1984 campaign was largely viewed as a referendum on the Bush administration. Vice President Dole, despite concerns about being too conservative for the general election, faced only minor challengers in the primaries, easily winning the Republican nomination. The vice president selected Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, a moderate who was the heir to the Heinz family fortune, as his running mate.
On the Democratic side, the party had learned a harsh lesson from the 1980 campaign and worked to quickly consolidate support behind candidates it felt could unite the party instead of alienate key factions like McGovern's candidacy had. The candidates quickly narrowed to Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, the political protege of the late President Humphrey and Ohio Senator John Glenn, the former Mercury Seven astronaut. Mondale and Glenn's dragged on until April, when Glenn was able to finally break ahead of Mondale in the delegate count. Mondale dropped out, believing that he would be given the vice-presidential nomination in the name of party unity, but Glenn, who disliked Mondale's calls to end the space program following the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, gave the vice presidential nomination to Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative southern Democrat instead. A furious Mondale refused to campaign for Glenn until persuaded by party leaders in October and by then it was too late to make much of a difference.
Foreign affairs dominated the election, and Dole was quick to tie himself into the Bush administration's successful involvement in Iran and the opening up of relations with China. Glenn attempted to draw parallels with Dole to both Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, claiming Dole was too extreme to be given the reins of power and that he was "a throwback to the days of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge". Dole was able to throw back that Glenn would be "more of the same", claiming that Glenn would "follow the Democratic tradition of reckless adventurism abroad", implicitly blaming the Democrats for the post-World War II conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.
The death of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and his replacement by hardliner Viktor Grishin in February brought the Cold War back into the forefront of voters' concerns. The Republican campaign seized on this, warning Americans "not to change horses in midstream". Grishin, for his part, used increasingly belligerent rhetoric to defend the USSR against what he perceived as "western capitalist attempts to weaken the Soviet Union and communist movement", effectively ending detente that had been on hiatus after Brezhnev's death two years earlier.
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The division among Democrats following the primaries and Glenn's perceived snub of Mondale had offset doubts about Dole's conservative views. The finely-humming economy and return of fears about the Cold War in the wake of detente's end also were the reasons why a majority of Americans gave the Republicans their third consecutive victory, something that the party hadn't done since 1928.