through "'Reagan' as an image [...] we are given a stake in the imaginary of the mass public in a way that dictates a certain appeal not so much for Ronald Reagan in particular as for the kind of public figure of which he is exemplary"
"A 1989 report in the Nation has it that Reagan was not a popular president at all. Gallup opinion polls, over the duration of his two terms, rated him far less favorably than Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, or Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was not appreciably more popular than Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter. For the left-liberal readership of the Nation, this surprising statistic spells relief. It encourages us to believe that the public might not be so blind, after all. Indeed, in the story that presents the stratistics, Thomas Ferguson claims exactly this sort of populist vindication, For him, the point of the story is simply that journalists who genuflect before Reagan's popularity are mistaken and irresponsible."
but for Warner, "it's far from clear how to take reassurance from such a poll"
"Reagan in one sense may have had no real popularity, as polls record it. But in another sense, he had a substantial and positive popularity, which he and others could deploy both within the political system and within the wider sphere of publicity So if we characterize the poll as the authentic opinion of the public, while viewing the media reports of Reagan's popularity as a distortion, then both the genesis and the force of that distortion become inexplicable."
"The Nation, then, gives a much too easy answer to the question of Reagan's attraction when it claims that there simply never was any" and it would be "equally mistaken to see the public as successfully recruited into an uncritical identification with Reagan"
instead, we may have "a stake in the imaginary of a mass public in a way that dictates a certain appeal not so much for Ronald Reagan in particular as for the kind of public figure of which he is exemplary"
"the most telling thing of all about the article in the Nation is Ferguson's remark that the myth of Reagan's popularity is itself 'ever-popular.' The problem is not Reagan's popularity but the popularity of his popularity. 'Reagan,' we might even say, is a relay for a kind of metapopularity. The major task of Western leaders has become producing popularity, which is not the same as being popular."
see "the Egocrat"
this also explains the mystery of Trump's popularity / unpopularity