Again I wonder, just what is to be gained by making yet another largely successful salient of the modern Right still more successful and sanctified? Once again I say, Reagan enjoyed far more respect and aura of "success" than he deserved as it was, so what interesting AH result are you aiming for by having still more Democrats capitulate still more abjectly than they did OTL?
As things were OTL, 1986 was just about when Reagan's wave crested and broke. This was the year the Iran-Contra scandal broke.
As you note it was also the year that Reagan pushed through a form of tax "reform." This consolidated his general program of lower rates, as far as he could push it while still also having a massive military buildup sustained and not being able to cut social spending more without risking a really hard reaction from the left, such as it is in this country.
It was also, IIRC, the year he was unable to appoint Robert Bork as a Supreme Court Justice and had to settle for someone else. In November the Democrats made gains in the Senate as I recall, with Iran-Contra being a major issue. Not in my opinion major enough; more and higher heads should have rolled with people like Colonel North paying serious prices, and it ought to have made Bush unelectable. If you happen to have seen another post I made earlier today it was also the year that a USN Aegis cruiser shot down an Iranian passenger jetliner over the Persian Gulf.
It may be that Reagan could have pushed harder and got still more, but he was showing some serious ragged edges that year.
I also don't doubt that his faction pushed hard for a tax program that was more to their liking still, and finding they had some limits, sold the one they settled for as aggressively as they could.
Why exactly should any average American look back with gratitude on the 1986 tax reform, which consolidated lower taxes on the rich and thus forced higher ones on the middle classes--and via defunding essential programs at the Federal level, forced states and local cities and counties to raise taxes, which means more often than not regressive sales taxes that fall most heavily on the poorest? There are plenty of people who should celebrate it and did--the wealthy plutocrats, and behind them, cheerleading legions who identify with them, going along to get along, although they objectively suffer rather than benefit, because they esteem their betters as they see it and perhaps because they hope to join their ranks someday, or that their children might. But most of us lost, we went down and stayed down.
Why is it that in exploring this era, every single one of your posts lately poses the question in the form of, "How can the US Right enjoy higher prestige as champions of the majority on economic grounds?" Do you perceive them as such, as better guided than the Democrats (God knows that is a low bar to clear!) in terms of the interest of the common citizen? If not, do you think that they might trick themselves into becoming real democrats by some weird political self-judo throw, that the scales fall from their eyes one day when they notice that things usually work the opposite of the way they claim to believe and they suddenly realize that Abraham Lincoln might well have done differently than they've been saying, and do as they accidentally did without realizing what they were actually doing?
World events, notably the liberalizing trajectory of the Soviet Union which was all down to Gorbachev and not at all to Reagan's faction (though I credit Reagan himself with just such a "scales falling from his eyes" event of sorts, to a limited extent, in reaching out to Gorby instead of slapping him down as a two-faced Kremlin stooge the way Reagan's deepest supporters expected and wanted him to) gave Reagan quite a few more shining moments on the world stage. This was despite and not because of the general drift and stated intentions of most of his Administrations. Unless of course one argues that heavy US military spending and lots of loose talk about glorious war against the Evil Empire (Reagan's term after all) and victory through space weapons etc drove the Soviets into bankruptcy trying to match US weapons prowess. (Of course if you listened to the Reagan administration and its backers, I was forced to hear them a lot back then, the Evil Empire had the drop on us in terms of massive investment in weapons. In high school a few years before one of my math teachers lectured us all on the wicked Soviets graduating ten times as many engineers as we did. Etc. Ivan was simultaneously at death's door and ten feet tall if you listened to them). But in fact the Russians did not respond to Reagan's buildups with comparable percentage increases in deployments of their own--they were after all already quite well armed, if one did not doubt the possible quality defects anyway, and with lots of manpower trained and nominally ready--again any question marks floating over the quality or loyalty of Soviet-controlled troops were there long before Reagan took office. So if the Soviet war machine bankrupted them, it was going to do it any way regardless of who was US President or what policies he had, as long as those policies did not include spontaneous unconditional surrender!
But the later 80s were also when the brief economic bubble so celebrated in '84 an '85 also started to burst. If Americans below the top tax brackets were going to love Reagan, it would not be because they delivered a strong economy--in fact it was starting to fall apart even at the top and never had undone the severe damage his early first term did to the majority of working people. They could love him because he projected confidence, because he was a lovable doofus, because Russia appeared to be softening, because he took no guff and shot up a bunch of brown people in Grenada and the Middle East (he actually did take a lot of guff, evacuating the Marines from Lebanon when it got too hot for them for instance, and it would not be until 1989 that the Contra policy of terrorism and murder in Nicaragua finally paid off by driving the Sandinistas out of power there--they're back again nowadays though). But because he was the friend of the common man in the street? Maybe people believed he was a "real guy and not one of those pretentious Ivory Tower liberals" but they could hardly point to their economic condition as evidence that he delivered the bacon. They could and evidently did believe that man does not live by bread alone, and that an America Standing Tall and slapping down disrespect like Rambo was worth waiting for better economic times for, and perhaps believed that if the Republicans could clear the temple of liberal regulations and choking high taxes, prosperity would in the fullness of time someday trickle down to them. But they could hardly believe he'd already delivered on any implied promise that they themselves would be better off. A Greater America, one with less whining and more sneering, certainly! A richer working class...no.
So how is it that you keep asking, how could these people have delivered that, when in fact they never promised to, not directly, when in fact they always said that prosperity comes to those who work hard for it and deserve it, and then celebrated the wealth of the already wealthy implying they believed people like Donald Trump (this is when he made his name first known outside of NYC) and Leona Helmsley were those hard-working deserving? Every suggestion they had regarding what was wrong with American society, not only economically but across the board, said that the already rich and powerful should be more so, should stop having liberal back-seat drivers heckle them and be allowed to do whatever they damn well pleased--privately, and also in government as any follower of Reagan's foreign policy could see plainly. Unleash the CIA, back our friends (people like Saddam Hussein say, or Pinochet in Chile, or our potential good good friends in South Africa--not the black ones, the white ones running Apartheid. And woe to our foes, in Grenada (where's that? Never mind, it was a great victory, don't worry about Lebanon, we kicked Grenadan ass!) in Nicaragua, in the hills of El Salvador, the Red Army in Afghanistan (thank God for those brave freedom-fighting, God-fearing mujaheedin!) But he wasn't quite up to fighting a big glorious war and winning it to lick the Vietnam syndrome, no, that was for George to do.
It was a consistent policy of celebration of wealth and power and contempt for people who did not shine on those terms, and contempt for scruples about violence or fairness. The purpose of power is power, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Why do you keep looking for help for the common man from these people? They may be heroes to some, and those people who can reasonably celebrate their achievements may be the chosen of God and the winners of our age, perhaps. But they never signed on with the majority in the sense of promising us anything but blood, toil, tears and sweat for someone else's benefit, so why pretend they ever even cared?