On Eagle Claw, I'll repeat what I posted here a couple of months ago:
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One thing that is often neglected in "what if Operation Eagle Claw had succeeded" discussions is that the time of the attempted rescue mission, there were still Americans who were walking around free in Iran. If Eagle Claw had succeeded, Iran could simply make them the new hostages.
Cyrus Vance pointed that out in objecting to the proposed rescue mission:
"I reminded the group that even if the rescue mission did free some of the embassy staff, the Iranians could simply take more hostages from among the American journalists still in Tehran. We would then be worse off than before, and the whole region would be severely inflamed by our action." http://books.google.com/books?id=RH5SZHYfMI4C&pg=PA82
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the leading advocate within the administration of a rescue mission, did pay some attention to this possibility. He argued "that we should consider taking prisoners back with us, so that we would have bargaining leverage in the event that the Iranians seized other Americans as hostages..." http://books.google.com/books?id=RH5SZHYfMI4C&pg=PA86
In any event, IMO even if the helicopters function perfectly, Eagle Claw is going to lead to a lot of US corpses, Delta and hostage, during the extraction at the stadium. Because of the tendency of US voters to rally behind the president at a time of crisis, it may nevertheless lead to a temporary boost in Carter's ratings, but no, it won't allow him to beat Reagan--the election after all is several months way and by that time the glow would be off the "victory" and people would be asking how Carter allowed the US to get into the hostage crisis to begin with, as well as devoting their attention to such issues as double digit inflation [1], rising unemployment, [2] the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (and how the Carter administration's response via the grain embargo hurt US farmers) etc. The notion that Carter lost only because there still were hostages on Election Day seems implausible to me. (For one thing, people forget how low Carter's job approval ratings were before the hostage crisis gave them a temporary boost. https://content.gallup.com/origin/g...roduction/Cms/POLL/bn1a9jq9g0qlldcnggvpea.png For another, the Democrats are still going to have a severe unity problem, thanks to Edward Kennedy's challenge to Carter's renomination.)
[1] http://www.multpl.com/inflation/table
[2] It rose from 5.9 to 7.5 percent between November 1979 and November 1980. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/UNRATE.txt
It's clear that had Eagle Claw succeeded, Carter could still lose to Reagan due to the worsening economy. But he would lose much more narrowly. And Republican gains in Congress would be blunted. In the long term Carter would be seen more like George HW Bush: successful in foreign policy policy, but not so on the economy.
IMO, in order for a release of the hostages to re-elect Carter it would need to happen in October 1980 as Reagan had feared.