The concepts that successfully accounted for Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory over “extremist” Barry Goldwater in 1964 fail to provide a satisfactory explanation of the magnitude of Ronald Reagan's victory over mainstream candidate Walter Mondale in 1984. Using the 1984 CPS-ISR continuous monitoring study (January-June 1984), this article argues that standard measures of voters' estimates of candidates' personal characteristics, feelings of warmth towards candidates, party identifications, ideological orientations, and socio-economic characteristics appear to be of limited help in accounting for the political changes in the electoral process that most of us sense. The conclusions suggest that a better understanding of these changes might emerge from studies that moved away from reliance on traditional concepts developed from surveys of the general electorate. Researchers instead should focus upon the political elites who run campaigns and develop concepts appropriate to studying the ability of consultants and managers to market candidates as successfully as they market other commercial products.