I remember it being considered a bit of a shift actually, when Reagan was popular with college kids for a while; it's the whole point of the humour behind Alex Keaton (and really, the whole basis of Family Ties - the parents were Democrat-voting hippies, but the girls were materialistic mallrat slackers and Alex was a Republican sock puppet) and a Bloom County series making fun of the phenomenon. The previous generation were the hippies, so, yeah, Reagan was just a kind of setback in a leftward march that began in the 60s (though the roots were probably even earlier than that, because the hippies were influenced by older people themselves.)