What was Reagan's appeal to Democrats?

[PoliticalShelter]

It's worth keeping in mind that Reagan actually didn't do as well with White Working class voters as commonly thought. He failed to win rural white southerners in 1980 (although quite easily winning them in 1984). He also lost large areas of coal country that republicans, particularly post-Bush republicans, tend to win with massive margins.

Many of these "Reagan democrats" weren't really working class, they were voters who had grown up in a working class background but under the post war economic expansion, had managed to claim a middle class lifestyle, and naturally began to grow a different set of priorities, that the Democratic Party often wasn't particular good at catering to. Combine this with the perception that liberal governance in the 1970s was failing, and the result is a large scale exodus.

However most of these "Reagan democrat" (at least the stereotypical Northern, Catholic one) largely swung back to Bill Clinton and many likely stuck with Gore, Kerry and Obama. Chances are the last president the Reagan democrats voted for, was a democrat, since they were almost all dead by the time Trump came along (in fact they were probably mostly dead by the time Obama came along).

The reason why these voters tended to be thought off as working class was because the media still tended to think,white ethnic Catholics as working class, even if this was horribly dated by the 1980s, let alone today.

[PoliticalShelter]

Job growth during Carter's 1st term was 10 million. Both of Reagan's terms resulted in 18 million. And this was despite the high inflation from the Iranian revolution.

This Slightly obscures the fact that when Carter was president he was seeing the mass entrance of the baby boomers into the workforce. By contrast Reagan oversaw the entrance of the smaller Generation X into the workforce.

Reagan also came into office when the unemployment rate was beginning to rise and had to preside over the early recession in the 80s, which had been the result of Volcker's sharp increase in the interest rate.