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Sixty-nine-year-old Ronald Reagan was the oldest candidate ever nominated for the presidency. Gaining national attention first as a movie actor, he initially shared the politics of his staunchly Democratic father but moved to the right in the 1940s and 1950s and campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Reagan’s political career took off when he was elected governor of California in 1966. He ran as a conservative, but in office he displayed flexibility, approving a major tax increase, a strong water pollution bill, and a liberal abortion law. Displaying similar agility in the 1980 presidential campaign, he softened earlier attacks on programs such as Social Security and chose the moderate George H. W. Bush as his running mate.

Some Republicans balked at his nomination and the party platform, which reflected the concerns of the party’s right wing. For example, after Phyllis Schlafly persuaded the party to reverse its forty-year support for the Equal Rights Amendment, moderate and liberal Republicans protested outside the convention hall. Moderate John B. Anderson, congressman from Illinois, deserted his party to run as an independent.

Reagan’s campaign capitalized on the economic recession and the international challenges symbolized by the American hostages in Iran. Repeatedly, Reagan asked voters, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” He promised to “take government off the backs of the people” and to restore Americans’ morale and other nations’ respect. Reagan won the election, and Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since the 1950s.

While the economy and the Iran hostage crisis sealed Reagan’s victory, he also benefited from the burgeoning grassroots conservative movement that had pushed Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964. That movement grew with the politicization of religious conservatives, predominantly Protestants who had traditionally refrained from partisan politics and who came to be known as the New Christian Right. During the 1970s, evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity claimed thousands of new adherents. Evangelical ministers such as Pat Robertson preached to huge television audiences, attacking feminism, abortion, and homosexuality. They called for the restoration of old-fashioned “family values.” A considerable number of Catholics, such as Phyllis Schlafly, shared the fundamentalists’ goal of a return to “Christian values.”

Conservatives created political organizations such as the Moral Majority, founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979, to fight “left-wing, social welfare bills, . . . pornography, homosexuality, [and] the advocacy of immorality in school textbooks.” Dr. James Dobson, a psychologist with a popular Christian talk show, founded the Family Research Council in 1983 to lobby Congress for measures to curb abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and single motherhood. The instruments of more traditional conservatives, who stressed limited government at home and militant anticommunism abroad, likewise flourished, while Schlafly’s newsletter merged the sentiments of the old and new right.

Reagan spoke for the Christian Right on such issues as abortion and school prayer, but he did not push hard for so-called moral policies. Instead, his major achievements fulfilled goals of the older right—strengthening the nation’s anti-Communist posture and reducing taxes and government restraints on free enterprise. “In the present crisis,” Reagan declared, “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Reagan was extraordinarily popular, appealing even to Americans who opposed his policies but warmed to his optimism, confidence, and easygoing humor. Ignoring the darker moments of the American past, he presented a version of history that Americans could feel good about. Declaring that it was “morning in America,” he promised an even more glorious future.