I was there in 1976 and you RINO's were calling us nuts and wacko's and extremists back then because we supported a real candidate instead of Nelson Rockefeller's nursemaid, the proprietor of "win" buttons, responsible for John Paul Stevens, a radical leftist on the Supreme Court. I supported Reagan over your pal Leslie King, alias Gerald Ford. The difference in his and Carter's policies were negligible.
If you want to re-write history, fine. Let's give you another scenario. RINO Ford wins and governs exactly as Carter, creating even more resentful Democrats. Your president in 1980 would then have been one Ted Kennedy. That's as credible as any of your scenarios.
Reagan won. Get over it. Now if we can only get this party back to his principles and away from the Bush family dynasty.
Of course he did. When Carter left office, there were 52 hostages in Iran, and the interest rate was at 21%, and there were gas shortages up the kazoo.
Carter only has himself to blame. His presidency was effectively the most incompetant presidency in modern history.
Bush's doesn't even come close.
Gerald Ford would have supported the Shah of Iran rather than abandoning Iran to the Ayatollah and radical Islam. When Iran's Ayatollahs drop a nuke on us, maybe you won't find the differences between Ford and Carter so negligible.
I certainly don't find 9/11 and 2000 dead in the War on Terror and over 10,000 severely wounded a negligible thing and the critical mistakes that spawned these evils were made by Carter.
We could go on to how Carter wrecked the economy, stopped oil drilling, allowed the CIA to be gutted, and gave away the Panama Canal, etc. to other differences from Ford that you consider negligible.
What you don't remember is that Ford could not have run for another term as he became President before half of Nixon's term was up.
Thus if Ford had been President and done a fair job, he, too, could have "paved the way" for a Reagan run and win in 1980.