November 7, 1984

When Rupert Murdoch bought The Chicago Sun- Times here last January, it looked as if there would be a bloody shoot-out with The Chicago Tribune. After all, Mr. Murdoch's Post in New York had challenged The Tribune's Daily News subsidiary, sparking a spirited circulation battle. The Tribune, however, has shrugged off Mr. Murdoch's challenge, as the two papers focused on different income groups for their audience. What is more, the parent Tribune Company is prospering along several fronts in its first year as a publicly held corporation. Its Florida newspapers in Orlando and Fort Lauderdale remain among the nation's fastest-growing dailies, audiences for its WGN radio and television stations in Chicago have soared, and its huge Canadian newsprint mills have enjoyed an impressive turnaround.

The Storage Technology Corporation, a major computer concern, said yesterday that it had received a $150 million line of credit from Chemical Bank to help its bankruptcy reorganization. Computer analysts, however, said the credit would not be nearly enough to save the ailing company without a major sale of assets, a joint venture with another concern, or both. The funds will, however, give Storage Technology a few months to find a solution to its problems, the analysts said.

IF things had gone according to plan, Lewis Ranieri would have become a professional chef, like other men in his family. Instead, he is running the department that reportedly accounted for about 40 percent of Salomon Brothers' $415 million profit last year. ''I have more money than I ever knew existed,'' says Mr. Ranieri, who grew up in East New York and is said to be one of Salomon's highest-paid managing directors. ''I never dreamed this big.''

For all the careful orchestration of campaign rallies and political commercials, the televised debates, the partisan clashes over fine points of foreign and military policy, it was the economy that set the basic pattern for President Reagan's stunning re- election sweep yesterday and that fueled Republican gains in Congress. In a very real sense the election returns followed the well-established script of the Reagan Presidency to make economic policy the central issue of American politics, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll of 5,051 people as they left the voting booths. For Ronald Reagan vaulted into the White House in 1980 largely on the strength of his biting attacks on the economy under President Carter and his telling question, ''Are you better off today than you were four years ago?'' In the midterm Congressional elections two years ago, he suffered a stinging setback with the recession that eroded Republican ranks in the House of Representatives. Now this year, interviews showed, the President won a resounding vote of confidence for his handling of the economy and used it to power a coast-to-coast landslide for a second term in the White House.

Ronald Wilson Reagan won a second term as President yesterday in an election that Republican leaders hailed as a sweeping personal triumph and a mandate for his policies. Mr. Reagan secured clear landslide victories in both popular and electoral votes as he defeated Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic nominee, in at least 48 of the 50 states. However, it remained unclear whether the powerful tide of support for Mr. Reagan ran deeply enough to carry enough Republican Congressional candidates into office to secure the ''historic electoral realignment'' that the President asked the voters to deliver. Reagan Is Hailed With more than two-thirds of the popular vote counted, Mr. Reagan led Mr. Mondale by about 59 percent to 41 percent. The President waited until after midnight, Eastern time, to claim the election that continued his tenure as the oldest man to occupy the White House.