The difficulty of imagination is we have never experienced a Reagan who ever really had to fight that hard for anything. Reagan ran over Brown in 1966, he ran over Unruh in 1970, he ran over Carter in 1980, he ran over Mondale in 1984. He ran against weakened Democratic incumbents who were embattled and had lost their popularity, and then made himself a popular (enough) established incumbent that easily defeated their designated successor. I don't know what this Reagan would do. Would he keep optimistic but pleading? Would he return to his former 1960s firebrand, railing against socialists and dangerous, seditious hippies and leftists? I do think that he would take passive-aggressive swipes, make it a narrative that the Carter years had been even worse, make it a narrative that Mondale's liberalism was going to hurt the economy, and make it a narrative that America still has far to go, but we're already on the road to recovery and we've already made progress and Reagan is the man to lead us through it. Maybe he'd make the analogy that Franklin Roosevelt took four terms to fix the economy (inaccurate, but how Reagan would phrase it), and the Depression was not over by 1936, nor would the recession be over by 1984, but it will be over, and it will be over under Reagan when it would not be under Mondale. And then liberals can prod him, saying WW2 ended the Depression, and WW3 would end the recession, which is why Reagan is working so hard for it.