All's said and done, I wonder whether Reagan would have been able to win in '68 -- it was a transition time, but I'm not sure the country was ready for an anti-government "Reagan" revolution, especially considering Goldwater had been rejected in a 2-1 landslide just four years earlier.
And if he
did win, I question his ability to govern effectively. The peace movement resented Nixon much more than it ever did Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon governed as a moderate who was willing to engage in dialogue with the activists. There would be a tremendous risk of Reagan sending in the National Guard to bust up protests and some hippie getting shot and being captured on film and that would be all she wrote for the Reagan Administration. Ronald Reagan would not meet them at midnight in the Lincoln Memorial, to say the least.
