Suppose for instance that I grant both Reagan and his anointed VP successor George H.W. Bush had their political ducks in a row much too well for any such crisis to arise, that the Army in particular was on their side firmly, and with them sufficient positive support from the powers that be and a vague confidence of the voting public they knew what they were doing that revolution was an absurdly remote fantasy. I think you'd recognize though that around 1987-1990 there was nevertheless a lot of articulate dissent and that some quite radical critics could draw remarkably large numbers of registered support. (i was around at the time to witness and participate in this myself).
Now suppose someone quite different than say G HW Bush is thrust into power, because President-elect Bush dies accidentally before his inauguration or shortly after it, leaving his VP pick J. Danforth Quayle to take office instead. On the whole the accidental President does try to govern much as Bush would have but the nation is polarized--for one thing a political witch hunt on the question of just how Bush died turns into the arrest, conviction and execution of someone on dubious evidence, and this fall guy is in fact apparently chosen to discredit liberal Democrats and radical dissenters, leading to a general law-and-order crackdown with yet more dubious outcomes. Limping along in a state of near-civil war, the Nicaraguan election of 1990 goes much as OTL, but former President Jimmy Carter is excluded from the process.
OTL he was approached by the ruling Sandinista government, in part due to his conduct when observing the 1989 Panamanian election, as a trusted mediator.
It is widely understood that the 1990 election was strongly influenced by the ongoing assault of US-backed Contra forces which it was understood would end if and only if the Sandinistas lost power, so it seems likely to me that even if denied Carter as overseer, the Nicaraguan regime would have if more grudgingly still than OTL agreed to an election, and that different observers might have acceptably kept it honest enough to deliver the OTL results, a substantial victory for opposition candidate Violetta Chammoro. But
Carter also played a role in persuading the Sandinistas to accept the result of the polls and brokered understandings of mutual security between them and the incoming UNO coalition. It seems entirely possible that had Carter been blocked from mediating a peaceful transition, by a White House engaged in a vendetta against Democrats in general and liberal ones in particular, regarding Carter much as they would Jesse Jackson as a grandstanding meddling fool, that peaceful transition might instead have turned into renewed civil war and Nicaragua into another Vietnam-like quagmire for US forces, since the Quayle White House would presumably back Chamorro, whereas the Sandinistas might maintain the election was stolen. If the sequence were that, recognizing superior Yankee force at work anyway, they did grudgingly turn power over, and then Chamorro were prevailed upon to crack down on them as dangerous subversives, then large numbers of Nicaraguans, many of whom I do believe preferred the Sandinistas but voted for the only realistic option for peace, denied that peace by a vengeful essentially Contra, essentially Somozacist new regime, would again back the revolutionaries and thus nothing but armed US force could uphold the new government in Managua.
Bogged down in a developing Vietnam like quagmire, but one that develops slowly enough that its full implications are unclear in November 1990, by then as OTL Saddam Hussein would probably attack Kuwait and entangle the Administration in yet another costly and major foreign war at the same time. However in 1990, the Republicans sense more opportunity than risk, play heavily on patriotism and the opportunity to dispel the Vietnam malaise with glorious victory, and the ongoing escalation in Central America takes a back burner in the news cycle; Republicans win a narrow majority in the House for the first time since the 1940s and take this as a mandate for a sweeping and firm conservative agenda, including of course massive use of military force, compounding the mess in Nicaragua and neighboring states being destabilized by the apparent unrelenting demands of US supremacy and vengefulness in the region. Routing a wave of popular volunteer enlistment to the Middle East, the less popular Central American conflicts are increasingly fought by largely Latino "economic draftees"--and indeed soon the real draft is reinstated, with the classic pattern of easy channels of legal evasion or mitigation via alternative forms of service--such as President Dan Quayle himself had opted for with important political connections when he would have been liable for service in Vietnam, with a stint in the National Guard in the USA instead--the draft to regular Army service in the increasingly unpopular Central American theatre falls heavily on minorities and less well off white youths.
As in Vietnam but even more rapidly and corrosively, the forces in Central America are polarized, with some actually developing much more sympathy for their Latin American enemies than was possible for American soldiers to develop directly for their Vietnamese foes twenty years before. The very largely Latino rank and file are severely destabilized with conflicting sympathies especially as conservative initiatives against welfare programs at home and a general relaxation of the notion that bigotry need be disparaged and held in check, joined in their dismay by African American soldiers and a lot of white ones too. Officers are gravely concerned; the collapse of the USSR is seen as a respite of sorts which the Quayle administration takes credit for, but this is credited to them only by sharply partisan conservatives; the nation is deeply polarized and the semi-criminalized Democrats are fighting desperately for their positions.
The 1990 debacle mainly defeated moderate, machine type Democrats while actually seeing gains in formerly securely Republican districts with some rather radical candidates backing an increasingly radicalized urban base. Administrative, Congressional and state initiatives to severely roll back access to legal abortion is expected by conservatives to consolidate their hold with affirmation of family values, as are other backlashes against feminism generally and a pushback against gay rights. Then the economy melts down, and again the conservative response which weighs heavily against the unemployed and workers and the poor generally in favor of supply side tax cuts, program privatization and other fashionable Chicago School nostrums (the same shock treatment they push for the Russian Republic and Eastern Europe generally) is expected to demoralize the left and consolidate the presumed populist support for conservatism across the board. The Republicans know they are in for a fight in '92 but also are confident they will win it. Democrats on the other hand have their backs to the wall.
The outcome then surprises everyone; the Democrats, despite manifest voter suppression in some key states, come back very strong, taking over 2/3 of the House and with 62 seats in the Senate, and big wins in state legislatures and gubernatorial elections as well, appear to have won a sweep. In addition to that their candidate for President wins a slim majority in the popular vote. But...he does not win the Electoral Votes, a very narrow win for Quayle--and one that turns crucially on several states known widely to have suffered major voter suppression.
In no mood to compromise, the House, its composition changed immediately upon the November outcomes being certified, passes a motion to impeach President Quayle on grounds of complicity in election fraud. Debate is minimal; everyone knows the issues at stake. The President orders summary action against key new Congressional figures and prepares to bring pressure on key Senators, but Congress affirms the immunity of its members, dismisses the charges against its members, and in this context key police and military figures choose to stand on Constitutional arguments against particular executive orders and support the political process. Proceeding to an impeachment trial in which key Republican Senators defect from party solidarity--these being ideological moderates with misgivings about the direction of recent policy who are also up for election in 1994; the Democrats just need 5--Quayle is convicted, his Vice President, threatened with another round of formal charges and quite complicit in enough actions to be convicted in turn, is persuaded to resign and the new House Speaker is installed. Facing vigorous public but clearly minority condemnation by angry conservatives, an Air Force high officer attempts to lead a general military coup but the majority of officers, being more realistic about the dire state of general morale in the military despite victory in the Middle East, refuse to back him; after some violence and bloodshed, the military recognizes the former Speaker as President.
Being still challenged in their legitimacy, the new Democratic alliance of Presidency and Congress takes a series of actions over the next two years to fight back in the Culture Wars, beginning with negotiating withdrawal from various Central American conflicts which have mixed outcomes--in an overseen and fair election for instance, Nicaragua again does not elect the Sandinistas, who as OTl are required to campaign democratically for power, but the thumb of US power is now clearly off the scales. To deal with the tanked economy the Democrats launch a series of infrastructural and other initiatives, while piecemeal tax code revisions reverse the Reagan era cuts on top rates and indeed raise them somewhat beyond 1970s levels, in particular to help pay for a sweeping national health program on the model of Good Medicaid for All--a "Bismarckian" regulated private insurance market is fostered to supplement levels of care beyond the basic but pretty comprehensive standard levels, and states are relieved of their share of Medicaid costs by total Federal funding of a uniform national system paid in part with increased income and corporate income taxes, increases in other Federal taxes, and an increased payroll tax, upgraded from the Medicare tax. That is heavy but it is deductible on Federal and state income taxes, states with heavy income taxes and other taxes can reduce them due to being relieved of their medical programs, and with private insurance optional, employers in addition to their half of the increased payroll tax are required to also match funds as their employees choose up to an upper limit determined by the net funds that companies with good programs paid formerly in combination with their half of the Medicare tax, the cap being set to leave the companies paying out the same amounts as before, if all workers elect to buy supplemental insurance.
Also, in view of the major scandals of the 1970s and 80s of corporate raiding of union pension funds, unions are guaranteed the right and encouraged to form cooperative non-profit medical funding pools under complete union control (subject to general regulation) in competition with private insurance; eventually the standard is a large, nearly universal AFL-CIO run consortium that non-union workers may opt into at slightly higher rates and which is lifetime portable, with a permanent investment according to time of subscription and scale of contribution; the residual private insurance market is patronized mainly by the wealthy and is highly competitive, being purely voluntary as the basic universal Medicaid, which incorporates Medicare and all welfare medical programs in one standard, is pretty comprehensive and near-universally accepted by private health care providers because it pays at a reasonable rate for all well-justified medical needs; since justification is generally by simple documentation of existing conditions and generally is straightforward and non-controversial, they generally pay very promptly and quite reliably for all standard treatments.
Another outcome of the electoral crisis of 1992 is that the Democratic blowout is seen as a clear repudiation of the idea that Americans support stringent abortion restrictions; it is evident that actually attempting to impose them drove much turnout, so Federal law restores broad rights;and Medicaid For All does not cover it, but supplemental insurance covering reproductive issues the public program still demurs is not expensive and can be covered in part with employer subsidy like any other policy--the AFL-CIO Union Medical Fund includes it automatically in the general policy paid at the same rates by men and women alike. The general economic effect of the health care reform is to tax the rich to transfer funds to the poor, which is of course denounced, but the new Democratic majority cites the shift of income generally from workers to the corporate-financial sector that prevailed from the mid-70s to 1992 to justify both the higher taxes and the partial transfer back. In general policy the effect of Democratic interventionism is to prime the pump for the coming mid-90s boom and guarantee that workers will benefit from it in greater proportion than OTL.
Since obviously the high tax brackets and corporate sector will scream bloody murder, the Democrats must keep up their campaign of ideological justification by arguing that the previous regime egregiously shifted the balance too far the other way, with unjustifiable policies corrosive both to living standards and general morale of the majority, citing the dysfunctional effects of fashionable deregulation and "supply side" policy generally, and tying these in ideologically to more spectacular acts of moral dubiousness, such as broad support for terroristic but corporate-friendly regimes overseas, twisting arms to privatize formerly public services (such as telecommunications) in Third World nations to the profit of a few and deteriorating service at higher cost for the many, and generally seeking to nullify public democratic power to check private excess, associated with extreme violence and deteriorating standards of civil society. This ties them into ongoing muckraking against the specific policies of the Qualye years, and that by continuity takes them back to the 1980s and the Reagan years as well.
Republicans may well respond that Democrats were complicit in this, but many of those who were have been removed from office in years since, by Republican vendettas that were more effective against those with more questionable records, and the rest simply apologize and add their testimony, arguing that what appeared to be the will of the people as well as the consensus of fashionable academic think tanks in retrospect was manipulated and deceptively presented, and that as a party the party of the common people was made to suffer for their cooperation and complicity by their victorious intimidators. They say "oops" and stress how they have seen the light since then, and also point to opposition and caveats at the time they had to pay prices for.
The economic and moral abuses of the previous regime being rhetorically fused into one, the dynamic is for the Democrats to prove their case, and this leads to the post-office impeachment of Ronald Reagan despite his age and infirmity. Quayle, in this scenario, being complicit in an open and shut case of subversion of the political process, would be tried in regular courts after Senate conviction and removal of immunity. The scenario for Reagan would be different. It is essential to tear off the mask of plausible deniability and establish systematic policy backing values in conflict with ostensible American values, to make the political choice stark and clear on the basis of documented fact. It is not necessary to personally punish a man who will emerge from the process as a demonstrated doofus, easily led astray by evil counselors and put up as the facade of a corrupt order, but personally incapable of anything that might be described as evil genius. To be sure some of his detractors--me, for instance--would hold that in a general way he certainly did understand what he was doing; my theory is that as Augustus Caesar of a post-republican age he was in charge, appropriately as a professional actor and spokesman, of his own image as national patriarch--our King as it were, while others ran the state under his aegis. OTOH if you wanted to see me defend the man's complexities I'd talk about how seeing the docudrama "The Day After" on network TV in 1984 his attitudes toward the prospects of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union changed--under Reagan we lived, as cartoonist Jules Feiffer put it, in "Movie America" indeed!