I pissed off a lefty awhile back (I love doing that) when he asked me who was most responsible for creating the "neoconservative" movement. He was wanting to rant about the the stupid Leo Strauss theory, but instead I answered, "Jimmy Carter!"
Which is quite true. Hundreds of leading Democrats (or ones who would later be prominent) ran screaming from the party primarily in reaction to Jimmy Carter's foreign policy fecklessness. We got some of our best and brightest, from Wolfowitz to Krauthammer to Jeane Kirkpatrick, from this exodus.
There was a group around then, called The Committee on the Present Danger that was kind of like the DLC today (more moderate Democrats, but even more hawkish). Mondale met with them and assured them he would keep Carter on the straight and narrow, national security wise, but Carter himself refused to meet with the group or its member. This group would later defect to the Republican party almost en masse, and those that didn't would nevertheless later align themselves with Reagan in various ways or work for his administration.