Would Reagan Be Nominated in 2012?

No, Ronald Reagan would not be nominated by the Republican Party, and there is not a single POTUS who would be nominated by either party if they were duplicated as candidates to run in modern Primary races. The most important political issues shift significantly from one decade to the next, and all modern candidates get elected by very careful craftsmanship of their respective platforms. After the candidates are nominated in the primaries, then their platforms shift very sharply to the center, quicker and more shamelessly with each progressing election season. Ron Reagan claimed that his father was too liberal to be nominated in the Republican Primary, but one problem with that claim is that the spectrum from liberalism to conservatism is not a one-dimensional scale as the partisans so often imagine it, and another problem is that President Reagan fell on many positions of that spectrum at various times of his own life. He was liberal when he was governor of California, he was conservative when he ran for the Republican nomination, and he was centrist when he was POTUS. If he got in a time machine and tried to run for the Republican nomination today, then he would be conservative according to how it is defined today, just like any other Republican candidate (except maybe for Ron Paul).