Well good thing they didn’t, he may have served 2 terms (until he died during term 2 and his sure to be worse VP took over and maybe would have won in ‘84 thanks to the sympathy vote).
True. I expect he’d have had a far better foreign policy than Carter (although that sort was already on the way out with the McGovernite left in full ascendance in the Dems). Had Reagan been able to muscle Ford out of the way in ‘76, he’d probably have beaten Carter, but the downside is that he’d have had to deal with heavy Democrat post-Watergate majorities that would’ve hampered him enormously.
Had Scoop Jackson won the 1976 RAT presidential nomination, Ford probably would have won the general. No way that Scoop would have won 11 of the 13 Southern states like Carter did (MS, AL, TX, TN, KY and NC probably would have gone to Ford, as would OH); remember, when Kerry got 47% in FL in 2004, he became the first Northern Democrat to get over 45% in a Southern state since Kennedy in 1960. And the only Ford states that I can see Scoop picking up are WA and OR.