The Ad That Helped Reagan Sell Good Times to an Uncertain Nation (Published 2016)

Given that Donald J. Trump appears to have locked up the Republican nomination after spending little on television ads, it may be hard to explain to younger Americans how a single commercial made a difference in the 1984 presidential campaign.

The one-minute commercial commonly known as “Morning in America,” created for President Ronald Reagan’s re-election effort in 1984, is one of the most effective campaign spots ever broadcast. The ad’s haze of nostalgia and optimism helped obscure Mr. Reagan’s lingering political problems with the deficit and unemployment.

The scenes in “Morning” would have fit almost seamlessly into the 1950s sitcoms “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver.” One difference is that the ad is rendered in soft, pastel colors similar to those used in “The Natural,” the Robert Redford baseball film also released that year.

Set to the music of sentimental strings, images include a paperboy on his bicycle, a family taking a rolled rug into a house and campers raising an American flag. The subtext is that after 20 years of social tumult, assassinations, riots, scandal, an unpopular war and gas lines, Mr. Reagan returned the United States to the tranquillity of the 1950s.

At the start of the ad, the narrator’s melodious voice says: “It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history.” This wording, which reflected the growth of the American population in four years, distracts from the fact that unemployment remained higher (at about 7.5 percent) than it was when Mr. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, left office.

In fact, Mr. Reagan’s party had been blamed for a punishing recession. Using the slogan “Stay the course,” Republicans lost 26 House seats and seven governorships in the 1982 midterm elections.

It’s true that by 1984, the severe inflation that helped Mr. Reagan defeat Mr. Carter in 1980 was down significantly, but under Mr. Reagan, the deficit had more than doubled. Although times were improving, the president was potentially vulnerable to attack for having failed to fully keep his 1980 pledge to restore the American economy.

Nancy Reagan, who was, as ever, deeply involved in the way her husband was presented to the world, disliked the pedestrian ads produced for his 1980 campaign, which appeared to bend over backward not to make Mr. Reagan, an ex-actor, look “too Hollywood.” And in 1984 what came to be called Tuesday Team Inc. (named for Election Day) entered the picture.