If my memory serves me correct, 1986 was the year Reagan pushed through a huge tax reform package. There was no phasing in the reform and a lot of people were hurt financially. That didn't help...also, not only was Reagan was pounded terribly by the press, but Nancy was pounded almost daily. We didn't have a FOX news back then or internet to get the real news out and it was the MSM all the time that fed people's perceptions... all that said, I loved and cheered the man.
We also didn't have GOP gerrymandered districts in 1986. Quite the opposite.
It was the conservative elites/intelligentsia that turned on Reagan . . . For example, William Buckley derided him as nothing more than "a speech reader in chief" because he (Buckley) felt that Reagan had 'gone soft' vis a vis the Soviet Union -- DEJA VU?!