Reagan wins put him in good position

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34146, 6 May 1976, Page 1

Reagan wins put him in good position

(N ZP.A.-Reuter—Copyright) INDIANAPOLIS (Indiana), May 5. Mr Ronald Reagan, the former Governor of California, has won three primary elections and now seems to have a good chance of beating the incumbent President, Mr Gerald Ford, for the Republican Party Presidential nomination.

President Ford’s campaign manager, Mr Rogers Morton, has conceded defeat in the Indiana, Alabama, and Georgia primaries, blaming Mr Ford’s defeat on a crossover to the Republican primary by supporters of the former Governor of Alabama, Mr George Wallace, a Democrat Party candidate. After 80 per cent of the votes had been counted from yesterday’s poll in Indiana, Mr Reagan led Mr Ford by 51 to 29 per cent. A computer prediction said he would eventually win by 53 to 47 per cent. Mr Reagan also scored crashing victories over Mr Ford in primaries in the southern states of Alabama, where he was winning by four votes to one, and Georgia, where he led two to one.

The Indiana poll gave Mr Reagan credibility as a candidate capable of winning outside the conservative South, and political experts thought he now had a good

chance of denying Mr Ford the Republican nomination. On the Democrat side, Mr Jimmy Carter continued his apparently unstoppable march towards his party’s nomination, scoring easy wins in Indiana and his home state, Georgia. Mr Carter was ahead in the fourth, comparatively minor, primary in Washington, D.C., and was involved in a close contest in Alabama with Mr Wallace,

whose Presidential candidacy was alive only in name after earlier defeats in the south. Mr Carter now has well over 500 delegate votes in his gallop towards the 1505 needed to gain the Democratic nomination at the party’s national convention.

Today’s returns put Mr Reagan ahead of Mr Ford in delegates for the nomination. He now had 348 to Mr Ford’s 296, although many of the more than 300 uncommitted delegates now chosen lean towards Mr Ford.

Mr Reagan cast himself as the underdog in Indiana, and during intense campaigning in the state had pounded away, as he has from the outset of his campaign, on the Ford Administration’s foreign policy.

He denounced what he described as Mr Ford’s plan to “give away” the Panama Canal, and accused the President of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union in the arms race. This has drawn an accusation from Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in Washington that Mr Reagan’s “irresponsible position” on Panama could lead the United States to war.