In perhaps the greatest political upset in American history, incumbent Gerald Ford, who was considered dead in the water after pardoning Nixon and after the 1974 midterms, narrowly defeated Jimmy Carter, the outsider governor of Georgia who endeared many but ran a vague, inept general election campaign. Ford performed strongly in the debates and managed to define himself as a leader outside of Nixon's shadow, and achieved a narrow 284-254 electoral victory thanks to razor-thin victories in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Mississippi.
What if Carter hadn't snatched defeat from the jaws of victory? If we assume that the Carter administration would have faced similar problems to Ford's term (the continued energy crisis, stagflation, the Iranian Revolution and Soviet-Iranian War), how would it have responded to such issues? Just as Jerry Brown won a landslide in 1980 over Vice President Howard Baker, would a Republican (like Ronald Reagan or Bob Dole) be favored to defeat Carter for re-election?