Hugh Carey, Lloyd Bentsen, Jerry Brown, Reubin Askew, or Walter Mondale would be likely contenders for 1980 if Ford wins in 1976. Brown or Mondale mean a closer win, but a win none the less. Carey would be the best option IMHO.
I agree with this list, but I’d also throw Birch Bayh onto it and imo Jerry Brown would be a top tier candidate in any race from ‘76-‘84. He just had an energy about him that could make him an Obama-esque “hope” figure at that time. If he won and the economy started to shape up like IOTL? Get ready for every politician between 1980 and today modeling themselves after the young, hotheaded and rebellious 43 year old Jerry Brown with a pecular mix of ideas: a love of space exploration (part of what earned him the nickname Moonbeam), an obsession with a balanced budget, and an intense rejection of luxury, with the goal of leading by example (as can be seen with his small apartment near the state capitol and gas-efficient car as governor). Jerry Brown is the sort of outsider that people must have wanted Jimmy Carter to be, and if he has the good luck of Republican fatigue, an economy that’s about to boom, and the sort of political connections and experience you can only get from both being the governor of the largest state in the country and being part of a political dynasty. I’m actually not really a huge fan of his, but wow, he would have done well to be elected President in 1980.
He’d definitely have his obsticles. Despite his conservative leanings as far as budgetary restraint goes, he was very much a social liberal and would be an activist president in a time where Reagan’s social conservatism was very popular. His legacy would also lack the mystic, and so the power, of Reagan’s. Brown didn’t fully retire from politics until this past January. I guarantee he would run for the Senate sometime in the 1990s like IOTL and if he won, he’d be the first former President to be a Senator since Andrew Johnson over a hundred years before.