Alice Wolf, who served on the Cambridge City Council at the time, explained that there was overwhelming support for Dukakis in Harvard and the surrounding Cambridge area.

When Dukakis ran for Massachusetts governor in 1982, Wolf said that the city of Cambridge gave Dukakis one of the largest margins of victory in the state.

“He was a very popular figure in Cambridge in the ’80s,” Wolf said.

As a result, when Bush ultimately trumped Dukakis in the general election in November, the results were disappointing for many members of the Cambridge community, 80 percent of whom voted for the Massachusetts governor and anticipated his presidency.

Glenn S. Koocher ’71, who was the warden of the precinct that Harvard was located in, distinctly remembers making a having breakfast at the Kennedy School the day after the election to get a sense of the sentiment after Dukakis’s defeat.

“So many people at the Kennedy School had been so obnoxious about talking about what was going to happen once ‘Michael’ was elected president,” Koocher said. “There was a lot of excitement at the Kennedy School because they all assumed they’d just pack up and move to Washington.”

—Staff writer Steven S. Lee can be reached at stevenlee@college. harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @ StevenSJLee.