Garner was quite popular among the Democratic base. After all, he was long considered a frontrunner for the 1940 nomination, even as his break with FDR was known.
He'd certainly be the 1936 nominee under such circumstances. As of his government, he'd probably act similarly to FDR in the first year or two (since they were initially in agreement). However, not on such scale. For him, that would be more an emergency measures than any deep reforms.
Yes this.
You have to remember that FDR was actually campaigning as a critic of Hoover's enormous deficits in 1932. His 1932 campaign was actually to THE RIGHT of Al Smith's 1928 campaign, who ran on a platform very similar to the New Deal BEFORE the Depression (Smith's right wing turn would come a bit later, in the mid 1930s). Many people say that FDR took ideas from Hoover, it'd be more fair to say that he took them from Smith. Many considered FDR's tenure as Governor to be Smith's spiritual fifth and sixth terms. While FDR was already a pretty liberal politician by that time (he was probably one of only a very few Anti-Tammany Hall reformers who had good intentions and wasn't motivated by anti-Irish bigotry), dealing with the Great Depression pushed him way to the left into what would've been (at the time) considered borderline socialist territory. And mind, he was President and Garner was Vice President.
Keep in mind, just twenty years or so before most people in both conservative and liberal camps thought that direct government intervention in how businesses were ran was wrong (talking about things like fire escapes). And this was a period of time when anti-trust legislation was all the rage.
As President, I wouldn't imagine that Garner would sit back and be like "oh hells bells!" unless he really wanted to lose re-election in 1936. It was considered pretty objectively by most people that emergency government interventionism was required by 1933. Hell even Hoover did something, though he refused to get directly involved in business (his downfall). Garner, who actually did have a somewhat "liberal" record (if we're thinking about Wilsonianism), might've governed as FDR Lite.
