^I can understand a small to medium group of moderate Obama Republican voters. I will never understand the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats. Maybe it's just because I wasn't alive during his presidency, but I've never seen anything that Reagan stood for or enacted during his time in office that would appeal to anyone, but the small fraction of the most conservative of Democrats
Very true on Reagan. He was a hard core right winger who was just the mouthpiece for others' agendas. Nothing he did objectively, from a policy standpoint, appealed at all to any Democrats or even most Republicans if you look at what the party is supposed to stand for. The Democrats disliked his cuts in social security, medicare,medicaid, education, police and fire, his trickle down economics, his deficits, etc. The Republicans, if they had stuck to their principles, should have disliked his use of industrial policy, his massive deficit spending, his protectionism(auto quotas, farm subsidies). Reagan did nothing to reduce the size and role of government and had a higher average unemployment rate than Nixon, Ford or Carter throughout his terms. The economy only came back for a brief period between 1984-86, and while there was strong growth, that would have happened no matter what as we were coming out of a SEVERE 11% unemployment, 21%interest rate recession in 1981-82. Unemployment never really dropped below 6% until 1988, and that was for a brief period before we hit the next recession.
Reagan's appeal came from the same place Obama's appeal comes from, frankly, even though I will be voting Obama. It is all about personality and star power, not issue positions. People thought Reagan was a good guy, charming, actor, etc so he appealed to them. All he had to do was engage in some 'change' populism(sound familiar?) in 1980 as things were just in the crapper between Iran, gas prices, the economy. Did not matter whether it was Carter's fault or not(many reasons it was not, legitimately, but that is another discussion), people just knew they wanted to shake things up in Washington, hence Reagan. 1984- Reagan was vulnerable and unpopular, or had been in 1982 and 83 for sure- the Democrats were just stupid and failed to capitalize by putting up a good candidate. Mondale was old news, establishment, had been VP when things were bad in the late 1970s, he was not going anywhere.
So Reagan's policies did not appeal to blue collar Democrats, his personality did. The term Reagan Democrat is just a pundit buzzword that is supposed to refer to people who crossed to Republicans in the 1980s, but as we have seen those were all over the place-suburbanites, independents, urban blue collars, etc. It does not however, refer to all of these people, it is used by the media to refer specifically to anti gun control, anti gay marriage blue collar Democrats living in rural areas.
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When religion gets seduced by power only hypocrisy and hurt are born out of it.
