Domestically, his term is little different from Carter's.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-welch-deregulation-carter-20180208-story.html “We really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government,” Carter said in his first State of the Union address, in 1978. “Bit by bit we are chopping down the thicket of unnecessary federal regulations by which government too often interferes in our personal lives and our personal business.”
If that sounds more like your conception of Ronald Reagan than the peanut farmer from Plains, it may be time to check your premises.
After televised hearings chaired by Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, based on academic spade-work by the liberal economist Alfred Kahn, featuring testimony from consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Carter in 1978 signed the death warrant for the Civil Aeronautics Board, thus breaking up the regulatory cartel that had kept the same four national airlines virtually unchallenged the previous four decades.
Thus began a federal assault on “price and entry” regulations, or rules that determine which companies can compete in a given industry and what they’re allowed to charge.
Carter also lifted individual prohibitions, most notably (thanks to an amendment by California Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston) on brewing beer at home. Result? You’re drinking it. There were fewer than 50 breweries in the United States when Carter deregulated basement beer-making; now there are more than 5,000. In two generations, America went from world laughingstock to leader in the production of tasty lagers and ales.
Such was Carter’s conviction about deconstructing chunks of the administrative state that he dwelled on it at length in his only presidential debate with Reagan.
“I’m a Southerner, and I share the basic beliefs of my region [against] an excessive government intrusion into the private affairs of American citizens and also into the private affairs of the free enterprise system,” he said. “We’ve been remarkably successful, with the help of a Democratic Congress. We have deregulated the air industry, the rail industry, the trucking industry, financial institutions. We’re now working on the communications industry.”
Here in California, then fresh off its Proposition 13 tax revolt, Jerry Brown, in his first stretch as governor, was sounding similar themes. Government must “strip away the roadblocks and the regulatory underbrush that it often mindlessly puts in the path of private citizens,” Brown said during his bracingly anti-statist second inaugural address in 1979. “Unneeded licenses and proliferating rules can stifle initiative, especially for small business….[M]any regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices.”
It is highly likely that Reagan would have functioned as a Hoover, an anticipatory President who governed identically to his realigning successor (look up 'Hoover's New Deal'). These things are historically determined and are not at all subject to the individual whims of individual politicians. It is entirely plausible that the 40th President in this scenario is a liberal Democrat - who leaves behind a legacy of economic deregulation and tax cuts for 'liberal' reasons.
