Why Did Ronald Reagan Get So Popular?

It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter is just asking to be beaten by someone else in the presidential election. Lo and behold, Ronald Reagan comes in and wins the presidency. But Reagan succeeded largely by having the sheer charisma and policies that the people of America were magnetized to. In the time of Reagan’s presidency, he became incredibly popular with the people for a variety of reasons from his good looks to the way he speaks. Reagan lives up to the appraise by considered as one of the most influential presidents in America’s history, but how did he get so popular? What might have made him more relatable to the American masses is that in his childhood, he grew up in the “normal” American life. He didn’t grow up in wealthy circumstances, his father was a shoe salesman, whenever he wasn’t drinking. Reagan was able to repress all of the bad from his childhood and focus on the positive and become the successful child of an alcoholic. Reagan became a lifeguard in his young adult years and was able to pull seventy seven people out of the river he worked at over seven years. Reagan saw himself as someone who saved people’s lives, and this carried over into his later years when Reagan became an
In his first term he called it an “evil empire”. Reagan also pressured NATO to put missiles in Western Europe. This made some positive results. The world wide anti-nuclear weapons movement, called the FREEZE movement was boosted, and it turned Reagan into the most successful nuclear abolitionist in the atomic age. Reagan spent nearly as much as Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter combined and much more than the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars. In Reagan’s second term, Reagan was much more conciliatory towards the soviets and worked to reduce the number of warheads. He toned down the spending and his rhetoric declaring “Our constant and urgent purpose must be a lasting reduction of tensions between