The story of why Reagan was in position to run against Carter in 1980 — and how he managed to turn Carter’s prideful home region against its native son — really begins in 1964, when regional tensions within the Democratic Party finally reached a breaking point. Since Reconstruction, when white Southerners developed a bitter hostility to Reconstruction and its northern Republican liberal architects, Dixie had been the most staunchly Democratic region in the country — so loyal that FDR actually won over 95 percent of the vote in several Southern states. For decades, the South elected Democrats at every level of the ballot; practically speaking, there was no two-party system in the region.

But as blacks migrated away from Jim Crow and into northern cities, Democratic leaders outside of the South came to see the enactment of civil rights laws as a political imperative. The Republican Party, then the default home of anti-segregation northern liberals, was well-positioned to win the loyalty of the blacks who moved North (where they were suddenly eligible to vote). Thus, the alliance between Northern machine Democrats and Southern conservatives frayed — until finally Lyndon Johnson put his pen to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The reaction from Southern Democrats was uniformly hostile. ’64 was an election year, but Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, Russell Long, among more than a dozen other Southern senators and governors, boycotted the party’s national convention in Atlantic City. And many of the Southerners who did show up came looking for trouble. 43 of the 53 members of the Alabama delegation, for instance, refused to pledge their support for the national ticket of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and were denied seating. And most of the all-white Mississippi delegation walked out when convention organizers demanded that a rival delegation — the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, a group of civil rights activists who argued that the state’s official delegation failed to reflect the diversity of the party — be seated with them as “honored guests,” and that two of the Freedom Democrats serve as at-large delegates. Infuriated by this “humiliation” and “embarrassment,” an up-and-coming Mississippi Democrat named Charles Pickering — who decades later would become the center of a national controversy because of his racial history — left the party on the spot, joined the GOP and became one of the godfathers of modern Mississippi Republican politics.

None of this caused Johnson too much worry in ’64. The nation had rallied around him after John F. Kennedy’s assassination the year before and, anyway, civil rights was a popular cause outside the South. That his Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, had actually joined Southern Democrats in their futile filibuster of the Civil Rights Act only made Johnson that much more of a shoo-in. He was elected in a thunderous landslide, racking up more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But the landslide wasn’t universal: In the South, Goldwater broke through and won five states — the best showing in the region for a GOP candidate since Reconstruction. In Mississippi — where FDR had won nearly 100 percent of the vote just 28 years earlier — Goldwater claimed a staggering 87 percent. Civil rights had finally come to a head in 1964, and the two parties had made their choice.

The highlight of Goldwater’s campaign, to the extent there was one, probably came at the end of October, when the candidate’s biggest celebrity supporter — an actor and one-time Democrat named Ronald Reagan — delivered a nationally televised address on his behalf. As well-received as it was, the speech did little to help the doomed Goldwater. But the conservative true believers who had had embraced Goldwater and helped him topple the GOP’s liberal Rockefeller establishment took note: Reagan was just as conservative as Goldwater, but far more marketable. The television age was dawning, and he was tailor-made for it.

Two years later, amidst a voter backlash against Johnson and his Great Society, Reagan handily defeated Pat Brown to become California’s governor. With the 1968 Republican nomination wide open, he was immediately touted as a contender, with Goldwater conservatives begging with him to run. Well into ’68, though, Reagan remained ambivalent, a posture that ended up costing him. By the time he threw his hat into the ring, Richard Nixon had already made serious inroads with the Goldwater crowd — particularly in the South, where Senator Strom Thurmond, one of the first segregationist Democrats to flip to the GOP, served as his chief supporter. Reagan made a play, but Nixon held him off, then went on to defeat Hubert Humphrey in the fall.

It was under Nixon that the “Southern Strategy” was born. The idea was simple: Millions of white Southern voters who had been raised to vote straight Democratic tickets were feeling more and more alienated from the national Democratic Party. They were up for grabs — Goldwater had proven it. But Goldwater had also gone too far: His explicit rejection of the Civil Rights Act played well in Dixie, but made him a monster to the rest of the country. The trick, then, was to wink and nod at white Southerners with signals that were simultaneously nebulous and unmistakable. Instead of arguing against civil rights, Nixon talked about “law and order” and, later, busing. In the fall of ’68 his task was complicated by the presence of Wallace, who ran a baldly racist third party campaign and won five Southern states. But Nixon managed to peel off Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina. He ended up with 301 electoral votes, but without those 43 from the South, he would have fallen short of the magic 270 mark.

As president, Nixon continued to court Southerners aggressively. Slowly, Republican candidates began winning races for the U.S. House and Senate in Southern states. Nixon swept the region in his 1972 reelection campaign — although he swept the rest of the country too, winning 49 states over George McGovern. It was against this backdrop that Democrats were so elated by Carter’s victory in 1976. Given the chance to vote for one of its own, the South had returned to the Democratic fold. Maybe Dixie could be saved after all.

But the Republican Carter had beaten, Gerald Ford, in many ways represented the Republican Party Southerners had rejected before Goldwater came along. A moderate Michigan congressman who was appointed vice president by Nixon in 1973, Ford had little natural kinship with Dixie, and he lacked Nixon’s cunning in exploiting the region’s racial sensitivities. In the ’76 GOP primaries, Ford was challenged by Reagan. In the early-going, with most of the primary and caucus action in the North, Ford ran up six straight victories over Reagan. With his campaign on the ropes, Reagan then prevailed in North Carolina — thanks to a huge assist from Jesse Helms, another former segregationist Democrat-turned-Republican. Reagan was a far better fit for Dixie than Ford, and his Carolina triumph set off a wave of late primary wins. The delegate race was virtually tied by the convention, though Reagan ended up falling just short.

As soon as Ford lost to Carter, Reagan became the overwhelming favorite for the 1980 GOP nomination. The man Goldwater conservatives had first sized up as presidential timber 16 years before was finally in position to lead the party. After an early hiccup in Iowa, Reagan crushed his main primary competitor, George H.W. Bush and sealed the nomination. Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were all high, and American confidence was sagging, thanks mainly to the economy, but also the the protracted hostage crisis in Iran. After accepting the GOP nomination in mid-July in Detroit, Reagan found himself running more than 20 points ahead of Carter (who had still not officially fended off Ted Kennedy’s intraparty challenge). It was at that point that Reagan, his voice hoarse from an infection, took a few weeks off for a working vacation.

At the end of July, Reagan’s campaign announced that he would resume campaigning on August 3. The first event on his calendar seemed innocuous enough: a county fair in rural south-central Mississippi. But the Neshoba County and its annual fair enjoyed a racially fraught history. 16 years earlier, at the height of “Freedom Summer,” three civil rights workers from the North — Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner — had been abducted and murdered by the Klan in Philadelphia, Miss., Neshoba’s county seat. Local and state politicians, like many local residents, had reacted by playing dumb “Maybe they went to Cuba,” Mississippi’s governor, Paul Johnson, said when news first broke that the trio had gone missing. The Neshoba fair had been around since the late 19th Century, and it had become a popular campaign stop for segregationist candidates in Mississippi — the notorious Ross Barnett was a regular. But no presidential candidate had ever before showed up. Until Ronald Reagan.

Reagan and his campaign sensed political opportunity, both in Mississippi and across the South. The state had voted for Carter in ’76, but only by two points. Reagan’s Mississippi state chairman, a young congressman named Trent Lott, was adamant that it could be flipped. So it was that a cheery Reagan took the stage that August afternoon and issued one of the most thinly veiled appeals to racial resentment in modern American politics. “”I believe in states’ rights,” he told the uniformly white crowd of 30,000 Mississippians, “and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.” Technically, he was talking about welfare policy, his aim in using the term “states’ rights” — the rallying cry for every politician who’d fought civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s — was unmistakable. The crowd responded with delirious cheers.

That fall, Reagan carried Mississippi — and every other state in the South, except Carter’s native Georgia. The Neshoba moment did not, by itself, bring this outcome about (although his margins in Mississippi and other southern states were exceedingly narrow). Nor did the South, by itself, account for Reagan’s victory over Carter. (It was, after all, a 44-state landslide.) But the 1980 election established that the South’s break with the Democratic Party wouldn’t be a short-term phenomenon. And if there’s one moment that captured the spirit that animated this realignment, it was Reagan’s proud invocation of “states’ rights” — and his audience’s gleeful response. It was the fulfillment of the Southern Strategy.

Reagan the optimist is everywhere. It’s become a common refrain among not only Reagan’s defenders but also among a wider and less politicized audience: He revived Americans’ faith in their country and, deploying his “city on a hill” rhetoric, restored patriotic pride after the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. This narrative isn’t entirely misplaced, of course. 

Reagan was armed with speeches, dramatic backdrops, wit, good looks and an unpretentious disposition, which he used to communicate to Americans that he believed in the country’s fundamental decency and its capacity to promote the cause of liberty and justice worldwide. Reagan, Lou Cannon has written, was an “unabashed sentimentalist.”

Indeed, Reagan’s famous 1984 tribute at Normandy to the Allied soldiers who stormed the beaches in World War II captures his sentimental side — and his American creed. He told the assembled guests, including D-Day veterans, that they embodied American ideals of freedom and liberty: “You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”

But the absence of doubt in so much of Reagan’s repertoire — the Manichaean streak he routinely displayed — applied to other, darker aspects of his rhetorical legacy. Perhaps Reagan “delivered America from fear and loathing,” as historian John Patrick Diggins once said. But it’s also fair to point out that he sometimes adopted a raw, vitriolic approach to politics, and his capacity for tapping people’s anger should be remembered as an aspect of his legacy, too.

He skillfully channeled the surging 1960s-to-1980s-era national antipathy toward liberal reformers, the welfare state and student protesters, among other demons. He had an uncanny, almost instinctual feel for the electorate’s mood. Throughout his three decades in political life, he repeatedly seized on people’s hopes, but also found their anger and played on their fears. In Reagan’s lexicon, optimism competed with anger.

For instance, while he spoke of unleashing Californians’ individual initiative during his first 1966 gubernatorial campaign, he also tapped voters’ fears that the social order was beginning to crumble and that liberals and their allies had caused the crumbling. He campaigned by charging that “a small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” had “brought shame” to the University of California at Berkeley, an elite, publicly funded school in the state’s higher education system. Describing California’s city streets as “jungle paths after dark” and college campuses as hotbeds of sexual licentiousness and immoral behavior, Reagan rode to power by depicting California as an overly liberal, permissive society. He vowed to crack down as one of his first priorities in the governor’s mansion. Appropriately, he had a sign in his capitol office that said: “Obey the rules, or get out.” 

Nor was Reagan above using the hot-button social issue of race to further his political agenda by tacking rightward. At one news conference during his campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, Reagan refused to criticize Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who had become a leading symbol of segregation and white Southern resistance to the civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s.

As president, Reagan mocked “welfare queens,” implying that African-American women on public assistance habitually cheated taxpayers out of their hard-earned money. President Reagan also defended segregation academies such as Bob Jones University (where interracial dating wasn’t allowed), and, most infamously, praised the cause of “states’ rights” in a 1980 campaign address in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been slain 16 years earlier.

Enemies lurked in Reagan’s often heated rhetoric about international threats to the United States. These enemies helped him to bolster his strong anti-communist credentials. While challenging incumbent Gerald Ford for the 1976 nomination, Reagan accused the president and other moderates of failing to defend America over the disputed Panama Canal. Reagan thundered on the stump that “[W]e built it, we paid for it, it’s ours and … we are going to keep it.” His rhetoric in that campaign, said historian Sean Wilentz, was “a throwback to the early 1950s, when Republicans attacked the Truman administration by caricaturing its ‘striped pants’ diplomats as effete, un-American, and soft on communism, and accusing these diplomats of having stabbed the country in the back.”

Reagan’s 1983 “evil empire” address is well-known, but it came in the context of decades of shrill broadsides against communist forces supposedly threatening to overrun the free world. Calling the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world” in that speech, President Reagan walked a fine line. He decried the Soviet system while also sometimes issuing more temperate calls for nuclear disarmament and arms control agreements between the two superpowers. 

Another theme favored by Reagan — one that reigns in contemporary politics — is that the source of impending disaster within the United States was attributable to the growth of big government. A bloated, out-of-control Washington establishment bore the brunt of Reagan’s attacks. Washington wasn’t a city of public service, according to his worldview; it was home to legions of inept bureaucrats, corrupt government officials, and a leviathan central government bent on enlarging its own authority at the expense of state sovereignty and individual rights. The federal government squelched entrepreneurial energy, and undercut the guiding spirit of America — freedom.

If there was truth to his broadsides, there was also a hyperbolic quality. Just as Reagan buoyed a nation beset by two decades of internal strife, he also deepened the coarse nature of American politics. Far from hovering above the fray, he was very much enmeshed in the most contentious debates of his times, and any historical assessment of his legacy during this commemorative week should take into account his darker rhetoric and angrier public persona — and how they benefited him politically.

But the reality of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and of Reagan’s three-decade career in politics, is far more complicated — and far more interesting.

It’s a topic we found ourselves writing about frequently in 2010, as Barack Obama’s poll numbers ebbed in the run-up to what proved to be a gruesome midterm election for him and for his party. Many of Obama’s foes on the right delighted in drawing unflattering parallels between the hobbled president and Reagan — and plenty of voices on the left joined in. To us, this was a vivid illustration of the degree to which Reagan mythology had taken hold: Few seemed to appreciate that in his first two years as president, Reagan’s poll numbers plummeted just as dramatically as Obama’s (and bottomed out an even lower level) and that even many of his allies dismissed him as a certain one-termer.

Ronald Reagan is one of the most consequential American political figures of the postwar era. His rise in politics, his record as president, and his legacy deserve careful and critical (but fair and respectful) examination — not feel-good hagiography. Over the next four days, we aim to provide just that with a series that casts the mythology aside and introduces — or reintroduces — America to the real Ronald Reagan.