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Not sure if this idea has been discussed in any kind of depth before, but I've heard it mentioned around the margins here, and a new article in Salon has piqued my interest. In that article, and in other threads on this site, the possibility, however remote, of a renomination for Gerald Ford in 1980 has been mentioned. Now renominating a President who has already lost a reelection bid, is a difficult prospect at best. But Gerald Ford is arguably the most likely President in the modern era to have pulled this off. So let's say that prior to the real opening phases of the campaign, meaning when the staffs are comi, ng together etc, something happens to Reagan that denies him the opportunity to seek the nomination, be it a car crash, a heart attack, lightning strike, whatever it happens to be, point is, even before the Republican nomination in 1980 even begins to be contested, Reagan is removed from the equation. Without Reagan, Ford steps into the void, and he wins the nomination instead of the perhaps more natural victor George Bush. Yes I know, this is probably horribly implausible, but this is for the sake of argument then anything. Anyway after a four year hiatus, Gerald Ford is back, at least as the Republican nominee. Who would be Ford's running mate here? Bush? Dole again? Jack Kemp? Paul Laxalt? Andersen was apparently mentioned as a possibility in a contemporary speculative article in the Christian Science Monitor in 1980. But Vice Presidential nominees are neither here nor there. What would a Carter vs. Ford match in 1980 have actually looked like? Given that Carter can't use his strategy against Reagan against Ford, what does the Carter reelection strategy look like? My guess is that he tries to blame all the problems of the then present on the failures of Ford's administration, and the Nixon administration before him. But I don't think that would work. Fundamentally the 1980 election seems to have been more a referendum on Carter than on Ronald Reagan. It's a small semantic point, but my sense is that Reagan did not win, Jimmy Carter lost, and there's a difference between the two.

Namely, Reagan's victory had more to do with a combination of outright hostility and at best ambivalence towards President Carter, rather than voters embracing Reagan or the conservative movement. Indeed, I think Reagan won in good part because he demonstrated, or seemed to demonstrate through his amiable temperament, that he wasn't a deranged extremist, a mere ideologue who could never be trusted with the Presidency. Reagan did not have to prove he would be a great President, he had to prove he would be competent, or at least not worse than the incumbent.

Perhaps my sense of 1980 is radically wrong, or mere liberal wishful thinking. But if I'm right, that would mean that Carter is in serious trouble almost regardless of who the Republican Party nominates, which means that ITTL Gerald Ford has a fighting chance. So what does this election look like? Who do you think the victor would be? (My money's on Ford, but again my prediction may be based on a fundamental misreading of 1980, or at best, a overly simplistic view of that race). And what would the next four years look like?
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