Reagan’s decades in public life, especially his years working for General Electric, had equipped him to articulate conservative ideas in easily understandable aphorisms. Speaking against the growing size and influence of government, Reagan said, “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” Under his leadership, the core of the Republican Party remained the relatively affluent, white, Protestant voters who supported balanced budgets, opposed government activism, feared communism, and believed in a strong national defense. Reagan Republicanism also attracted middle-class suburbanites and migrants to the Sunbelt states who endorsed the conservative agenda of combating crime and limiting social-welfare spending. Suburban growth in particular, a phenomenon that reshaped metropolitan areas across the country in the 1960s and 1970s, benefitted conservatives politically. Suburban traditions of privatization and racial homogeneity, combined with the amenities of middle-class comfort, made the residents of suburban cities more inclined to support conservative public policies.

This emerging Reagan coalition was joined by a large and electorally key group of former Democrats that had been gradually moving toward the Republican Party since 1964: southern whites. Reagan capitalized on the “southern strategy” developed by Richard Nixon’s advisors in the late 1960s. Many southern whites had lost confidence in the Democratic Party for a wide range of reasons, but one factor stood out: the party’s support for civil rights. When Reagan came to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to deliver his first official speech as the Republican presidential nominee, his ringing endorsement of “states’ rights” sent a clear message: he validated twenty-five years of southern opposition to federal civil rights legislation. Some of Reagan’s advisors had warned him not to go to Philadelphia, the site of the tragic murder of three civil rights workers in 1964, but Reagan believed the opportunity to launch his campaign on a “states’ rights” note too important. After 1980, southern whites would remain a cornerstone of the Republican coalition.

The Religious Right proved crucial to the Republican victory as well. Falwell’s Moral Majority claimed that it had registered two million new voters for the 1980 election, and the Republican Party’s platform reflected its influence. That platform called for a constitutional ban on abortion, voluntary prayer in public schools, and a mandatory death penalty for certain crimes. Republicans also demanded an end to court-mandated busing to achieve racial integration in schools, and, for the first time in forty years, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Within the Republican Party, conservatism had triumphed.

Reagan’s broad coalition attracted the allegiance of another group dissatisfied with the direction of liberalism in the 1970s: blue-collar voters, a high number of Catholics among them, alarmed by antiwar protesters and rising welfare expenditures and hostile to feminist demands. Some observers saw these voters, which many called Reagan Democrats, as coming from the “silent majority” that Nixon had swung into the Republican fold in 1968 and 1972. They lived in heavily industrialized midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois and had been a core part of the Democratic coalition for three decades. Reagan’s victory in the 1980s thus hinged on both a revival of right-wing conservative activism and broad dissatisfaction with liberal Democrats — a dissatisfaction that had been building since 1968 but had been interrupted by the post-Watergate backlash against the Republican Party.